Seneca's First Gorge ConcertFor Memorial Day Weekend, we embarked on a journey to the Gorge Ampitheater for the Sasquatch Music Festival. Seneca recently installed a Mega-Therm heater for our veggie oil fuel line that ensures that the temperature of the oil is high enough, as well as an auxillery pump to help out the injection pump with processing veggie oil. So the 175-mile trip was a test of the newly upgraded greasecar system. And thanks to Seneca’s troubleshooting and work on the bus all day Saturday before we left, we made it to the Gorge and partway back on grease with no problems! WOOHOO!

Switching to grease went very smoothly, and the Mega-Therm heater really kicked in, heating the oil up to the ideal 175 degrees very quickly. We noticed that it has a tiny bit less power going up hills on grease compared to diesel, but that can be expected. Other than that, there was no noticeable difference in engine performance on grease. The bus enjoyed being vegan for the trip! Now all that needs to be finished for the grease system is mounting the switches and gauges to the dash.

The only problem we had was a bit of difficulty getting the bus to start. It takes several tries of cranking to get her going. Seneca thinks there may be some air getting into the lines, and plans to replace a connecter in the grease lines that seems a little cheapy. Also, we ordered some new glow plugs because those need to be replaced periodically and often problems starting indicate faulty glow plugs. So hopefully once those things are replaced she will start up more reliably. Diesels always have a little trouble starting in the cold, but we want her to be as reliable as possible.

We’re now just mostly working on small things to get the bus ready for our trip: fixing the curtains, replacing the interior upholstery, deep cleaning the inside, and working out the last kinks in the grease system and new engine. We’ve got a few more weeks before we hit the road, and were very happy that this test run of the grease system did so well. Yay for the volksvegan! May there be many more greasy miles ahead…