Waste Vegetable Oil Fuels

Today was a biodiesel-ful day. It started with a lunch our trip to check out this eBay wagon in our own little town of SLC, and ended with Jim filling up with biodiesel and taking some for the road. He’s committed now.

Cummings Lever Cars, on Main on 40 something-th South is a micro oasis for 300D’s. They should rename themselves W123s-R-Us. It was amazing. We were looking at this eBay car and lo and behold there was an even better white wagon just a car way, not to mention the 300D sedan, the black CD, their friend in the SD who showed up while we were kicking tires, and some lady in a yellow wagon we saw on our test drive who naturally was there when we got back. The white wagon was tempting and he was pushing it. He even offered to get us in for $500 and a self financed easy payment plan, but empty pockets kept us honest. Hopefully we can get one of our periphery semi-interested folks down there to commit and become one with our crazy “co-op”.

Jim and Steve showed up at about 8 and we started tinkering. We drained of the glycerin from the bottom of the processor, and then transfered the biodiesel to the wash tank. We made a lot of biodiesel. I guess only 35 gallons but with the wash water in there it seems like a bunch. We spent some time refabing the misting system. I had only set up 3 spray heads, so at 3 gal/mil it was slow going. Isn’t “mil” the correct abbreviation for millennium? We I had bought an additional mister kit that got us up to 12 heads. One of the mister inserts came up missing so we are running 11. It is still going and who knows when the wash waster will finish filling up. I was very stoked about the final installation. What we finally did was zip tie a strand of 11 heads inside the edge of the barrel where the top meets the side. With the heads pointed in and a bit down the top of the biodiesel gets a good even misting. I think what we’ll end up doing is setting up a T so that the pressure is a bit more equalized for more heads. Maybe we’ll get more spray and less dribble.

Finally Jim has run enough miles this week on his new 300SD to empty half a tank. HE was tooling around last Saturday and just happened into the random no name car lot. i guess they take donations of cars for some charity, and had taken in this car two hours earlier. He called me up, and I went down there to check it out. Yeah there was a couple of rust spots, the seat was broken, the dash was cracked, and it was sooooo dirty, but they only wanted $600. Hello! After he had decided to buy it we also found out why the engine looked so nice. It’s only 60k old. Oh yeah and the rear end and tranny are new too. What? $600!!!? Anyway… Jim scored and has himself a new biodiesel rig. He fully committed himself tonight by toping off his tank with 10 gallons of our first batch. His plan is to go to Moab tomorrow, so he’s not messing around. Good for him. I have no doubt he’ll make it there and back with no probs. Crazy to think we made that stuff in my garage.