I will be making the maiden voyage in the newly-converted greasecar this weekend! I’m going down to McCall to show off the bus to my parents, who used to own a very similar one. It’s going to be about 400 miles round trip, and Seneca anticipates that I should be able to make the whole trip on one full grease tank, about 15 gallons. This will be a test to see if the miles per gallon on grease are better or worse than regular diesel, on which we get about 30 MPG. Most “greasers” say they get similar or slightly better mileage on grease, so we’ll see. I will be hitting some mean hills though, with the itty bitty 1.6L engine I’m sure it will be slow. But it’s a great way to test out the grease system. The only thing I’m nervous about is that Sen isn’t coming with me, so I just hope we have no car troubles. Send me & the Volksvegan some good vibes for a safe trip!
We have now secured 3 regular sources for waste oil. We also found out who our competition was, there are a number of locals who make bio-diesel out of wvo, and they have set up agreements with the biggest restaurants with the best grease. So that sucks, but maybe they can learn to share. Until then, we get about 5 gallons a week from each of our three sources, although the timing on 2 are a little irregular. That should more than cover our in-town driving, since we rarely drive and do most errands by bike. We really want to get a stockpile saved up for road trips though. We’re taking the bus to a barter fair September 9-10 and another much farther one the second weekend in October. I’m excited to finally be taking some veggie-fueled trips, and the bus is perfect for barter fairs since we can camp out in it and set up a canopy on one side of it to use as a booth. I sell and barter with handmade gemstone jewelry and herbal soap & massage oil at the fairs.
Tomorrow we collect more grease (I’ll try to get pictures this time) and take the bus into the shop to have the belts replaced and hopefully get our temperature gage fixed. The temperature gage stopped working, and it’s pretty important, so if they can’t fix it we might have to take our maiden voyage a week later. 
We’ve been on a mission to collect as much grease as possible lately. We now have two regular sources, a local breakfast restaurant and a bar & grill. Still not a lot of grease though. We’ve tried talking to several restaurant managers and are finding that many of the larger places have collection companies contracted to take their grease. Many companies have started paying people for it, and are turning it into bio-diesel. The bio-fuel craze is here!
I went on my first collection run this weekend with Andy. The bio-brothers have quite the filtration set up! We use a long tube connected to a pump and 3 filters to suck the grease out of the bin, through the filters, and into a collection container. Then it’s all ready to put in the tank. We got a big bin to collect filtered grease in the garage, so we’re slowly building up a stockpile. I’m hoping to have enough to make it down to McCall to visit my parents this weekend. The bus needs a good bath before then, too…
Well, we have a greasecar! Seneca finished up the greasecar kit installation on Friday. Here is the converted engine… the main additions are 2 valves and a fuel filter for the grease, and of course the hoses carrying grease from the tank. The wiring is a bit shoddy at this point because the wire that came with the kit was too short, so we gotta call greasecar to get a longer wire and re-do the wiring. I’m sure it’ll look much better since the wire we got is a single insulated wire, and it will be hidden under everything up to the front of the bus.
Before running on grease, we had to warm up the engine and time how long it took to purge veggie oil from the tank. When we stop the car, we’ll have to purge it first, so it’s good to know how long before we turn off the car we need to flip the grease switch off. We have a buzzer that warns us if we shut down without purging the lines, as well, but we still need to install it once we get the longer wire. Our purge time is pretty quick at about 40 seconds. In the picture, Seneca watches the veggie oil tank and waits for diesel fuel to start flowing back in, indicating the purge is complete.
We took our first test drive in the greasecar at last! We ran it on pure veggie oil instead of waste veggie oil for the first run, and just did a quick trip out to the park. She drove perfectly, and Sen says the engine sounds a bit quieter on grease. We even stopped to smell the exhaust to make sure it was truly on grease. The exhaust on grease smelled very mild and almost like nothing, it’s a bit more of a french-fry smell with used oil, but it sure beats diesel exhaust!
We’re quite excited about finally being up and running on grease! It was much easier than we thought to convert the bus, and hopefully we’ll have many veggie-fueled travels from now on. We’re not quite ready for a road trip yet, we need to get the wiring for the kit done properly, mount the gages a bit better, and get new tires and wheels put on the bus. Then, let the grease collection commence!
We’re making progress on the Greasecar kit installation! (OK, I guess I should say Seneca is making progress while I work and check on him periodically to take pictures!) The filter & valves are installed, the veggie oil fuel tank is in place, and now Sen is working on getting the coolant lines and fuel lines all hooked up. It’s all a bit above my head, but Sen’s been reading the instructions religiously (see the picture at left for proof). The kits are actually pretty straightforward and easy to install, according to him. They’re just a bit time-consuming.
Seneca (with the help of his brother) spent most of yesterday late into the night getting things mounted and holes drilled. He says if all goes well we could have our first veggie-fueled test drive by tonight! I’m pretty excited but I don’t wanna rush them of course. We were hoping to get it done by this weekend but it looks like we may not be able to take a trip until later because we have new wheels and tires to install first, and the tires are on the way.
Here is the veggie oil tank that fits just perfectly under the rear seat. This will hold filtered veggie oil. We have a filtering system and a few gallons of filtered oil already. You can see the two holes on the right for the hoses, one goes to the engine & one is for a return hose. When we use the veggie oil we’ll have to flush it from the engine (hence the return hose) and run on diesel or bio-diesel for a bit to be sure that no veggie oil is left in the engine or lines to solidify. Luckily the kit comes with an alarm in case we try to shut down without flushing the system.
Juneau chews on his stick and “supervises” Seneca while he’s working under the bus. Here he is running hoses for coolant which will help heat up the veggie oil so it’s viscous enough to use. There’s a heating element in the tank and one on the fuel filter, and all the hoses are insulated to keep it warm. After the components are all installed, we have some gages to mount on the dash and then I think she’ll be good to go! Now we’re going to start collecting grease a lot more seriously & consistently, we’ve got a couple local restaurants that have been giving us grease but we need as many sources as possible since there are 2 greasecars in the family.
Well, that’s what we’ve been up to for the last couple of days. We ordered new tires and already got some new wheels so that’s the next step in the restoration. Once those are installed we’ll definitely be ready for a road trip! Now, if only we could get those concert tickets we’ve been wanting…
I just realized I haven’t even put a picture of the bus up yet! I guess I got too distracted looking for bio-fuel related links (see, I added some new ones!) and forgot about her. (Yes, the bus is a she, because of her small diesel engine she clearly has no balls and goes slow).
Anyway, here is a pic of her in Yellowstone, it’s a good BEFORE picture, and I’m sure I’ll have several more DURING and AFTER pictures to come as we go through the conversion process. We’ve been busy and haven’t made much progress lately, but have just been doing some research and planning.
Yesterday Andy (Seneca’s brother) finished installing his greasecar kit. He has a 1975 Mercedes Benz that now runs on Veggie Oil! We took it out for a country drive yesterday to test it out, and it runs great! Andy made us all smell the exhaust, and yes, it smells like french fries (a vast improvement over diesel exhaust). The engine actually ran a bit quieter than it did before as well. So Andy, Seneca, Juneau, and I piled in to the Grease-Benz and headed for some country roads.
Now that Andy’s running on grease, we’re even more motivated to get the VW converted. Seneca finished up some other upgrades (new hemp/organic cotton pop-top canvas, brighter headlights, a water pump for the sink, and new injectors for the engine), and the grease conversion is up next. Stay tuned! 
I just ordered From the Fryer to the Fuel Tank, a book on alternative fuels. I’m about halfway through it right now, and it’s a great read. The first few chapters explain why bio-fuels are so important and why we need to get off our petroleum addiction. Not only is petroleum a non-renewable resource, but the pollution it releases is contributing to global warming, the wars we wage to defend our oil supply are expensive, bloody, and unnecessary, and we’re funneling our money for fuel directly out of the country when we could be re-investing it by using bio-fuels. This book has some great points about bio-fuels that I didn’t realize. The first is that bio-fuels are carbon-neutral: because they come from plants (which can be grown domestically, adding jobs and using fallow fields), the CO2 that these plants use in their lifetimes compensates for the CO2 emissions that occur when bio-fuels are burned. It’s a closed cycle. Emissions of other harmful chemicals are much lower than petroleum-based fuels, as well.
I’ve also found out from reading this book that the original diesel engine was designed to run on vegetable oil! It was designed by Dr. Rudolf Diesel, who first demonstrated the engine using peanut oil. There are many other bio-fuel options available as well; besides bio-diesel and Waste Vegetable Oil, gasoline engines can run on ethanol, which is made from corn. It’s unfortunate that our country is far too invested in the petroleum industry to make a serious shift over to these options. I guess it’ll take one greasecar at a time to start this revolution!
We saw the perfect slogan for a bumper sticker to put on our converted VW: This car is run on bio-fuels: NO WAR REQUIRED!
