Not much news on the bus-front lately since it isn’t running at the moment. Sen & his dad spent lots of time on the injector pump and then found that the starter needs more work. Now we’re just waiting for paychecks and warm sunny days for working on the bus. A garage would come in pretty handy right now…
We made it to the Okanogan Family Faire, but the bus didn’t. 
It was still a fun trip and I can’t believe we packed all our stuff, Juneau, and a friend in the car on the way there. We had several friends from all over camp with us and I traded and sold lots of massage oil & soap, and a necklace. We even brought home 3 gallons or so of quite clean waste veggie oil from the curly fry booth near our booth! 
I’ll update when there’s news, Seneca should be working on the bus tomorrow. Until then, we’re still regularly collecting grease and have quite a bit in our barrel. It’s much more difficult to work with now that it’s so cold though. It solidifies in the cubies that we leave it in to settle out the hydrogenated & animal oils, and sometimes we have to bring them inside by the heater (ew!). Once we get the grease in the big storage barrel we can just heat it with our little tank heater which goes inside the barrel, so pumping it into the car tank from there isn’t too difficult.
Well, I better get ready for our Halloween party & finish up some work – ciao for now!
The bus is temporarily out of commission, and we need all the good wishes we can get to get it back up & running by next weekend for the biggest, bestest barter fair ever! Seneca and his dad have been working on it the past week installing a new starter and rebuilding the injector pump. The injector pump was quite a project, and now it’s in the shop getting calibrated, then they have to install it and hopefully that will be the end of the leakage. On our last trip we went through way too much grease because of the injector pump leak, so hopefully this fixes it!
We are headed to the Okanogan Family Faire, the biggest and last one of the season, October 12-15. We are volunteering to be on “dog patrol” and will be running a booth out of the bus. Of course we’ll be making the trip on grease, which we have been collecting pretty regularly from a few of our sources.
The grease has had a harder time separating now that it’s getting colder, so we may need to move it into the garage and use a heat mat when we first bring it home and let it settle. We put baking soda in it when we first collect it which makes all the hydrogenated oil and animal fat fall to the bottom. Much of it settles out naturally as well, but when it’s cold the grease solidifies more easily and the separation doesn’t work as well. Starting the bus in the cold will require us to run on diesel a bit longer before the grease is warm enough to switch over as well, and cold starts are always interesting in diesels, so wish us luck for the cold season!
Good vibes are needed for a speedy calibration & installation of the injector pump. That should be the last repair we need to do for a while (at least until we replace the engine with a newer, more efficient, and more powerful turbo diesel one). Stay tuned for stories of the bus at the barter faire (hopefully it’s fixed in time)!
