Thursday, June 14, 2007

a little -fuck you- to big oil.

Today was the first wvo (waste veg oil) filtering day of the year. I finally got my booty down to las vegas (viva!) earlier in the week and got some great oil from my favorite, sleepy, no one cares what i'm doing dumpster.Its a nasty stinky messy job but hey, i brought home around 20 gallons so thats a 60 some dollar job.

I thought i'd post a bit about the process....if you have absolutely negative amounts of interest in veggie cars then just skip it baby!
I got my equipment from both fattywagons and vegpower.

first it gets filtered through these heavy sock filters...this can take hours...drip drip drip. Notice how totally high tech my setup is.

This is my beloved 1981 mercedes 300td wagon.We found eachother down in vegas a couples of years ago...she was 800 bucks. Tanks these cars are. After 85' they started making the engine blocks out of aluminum unlike this beast with the cast iron block, so its the ideal machine for thick veggie oil.
Some modifications are necessary to insure that the oil stays hot and thin. My car has a simple single tank conversion so i can only pull this off when its warm out...otherwise the oil waiting in the fuel tank is too thick to do its job. A tank heater of some sort would help a lot...but thats for another day when i win the lottery. Its also ok to mix whatever ratio of biodeisel or dinodeisel to wvo in the tank to help it get started in cooler weather.
heres some photos of what was added....this is the first filter the oil reaches, its heated and it seperates out any water.
the orange wire is a hot wire that keeps the injectors nice and hot so the oil is the right temperature when its injected/sprayed.

So anyway, now that the oil has gone through the sock filters its ready to go into the car. Notice the rich amber color...and its not cloudy!


and this is my favorite part....i usually chuckle out loud.....i've a little deisel fuel pump that runs off the battery and glug glug glug i love love the sound of my tank filling with something that isn't linked to trazillions of wasted dollars, wasted lives, endless war and hey lets not forget climate change.and it smells like french fries when i'm drivin' around.
yay!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Cool. Didn't know it was that easy although I see it takes time.

So, question- can you then put in diesel in like usual for winter or are you stuck with only the veggie oil for that vehicle? Love the wagon btw!

aaron ambrose said...

you can go back and forth or mix them or whatever. when its all or mostly deisel i will leave the injector hot wire off (i've a switch for it inside the car) since reg. deisel doesn't need the heat.

Jbeeky said...

I have been researching this for a while. I would love an old mercedes station wagon and think I can swing the veg oil process. But the cars are going faster than hotcakes here! Good for you, Erin!

Rosie said...

I have absolutely no idea what you just did. It looks great, but I would have thought there would have been other things you would have to do to your car to make this work.