GreaseDrive

So here we are… It has been a while since my last posts.  I have be much to busy,  I have been building a small straw-bale cottage on some property I jointly own with 5 friends in upstate New York.  Its a very small building only 9×16′ inside but it is my first real straw-bale experiment.   We are making a few mistakes but it is going up! You can read about the progress here:  The Dacha

Besides all that my 300D is doing well but she is showing some signs of being tired.   I am having several issues.

1. Secondary water pump has died,  So the coolant takes a long time to fully circulate through my system.  I have considered just removing it to reduce its restriction.  Even with the pump still in in the coolant loop if I am driving on the high-way it eventually pushes a good amount of hot coolant to the trunk but not any sooner.  I suspect removing the pump would help this out.  But it won’t be nearly as fast or get as hot until I replace the pump.   Before it died I could feel a noticeable amount of warmth on the coolant lines in the trunk in less than a minute on a ice cold start.   I ordered a new one on Ebay for $75.
2. Vacuum system is on the fritz again,  I’m not sure if I have a nasty vacuum leak or if my pump is actually failing.  Sometimes it works just fine other times the entire vacuum system is out.  Its not the end of the world its just annoying.  I already purchased a used vac pump but I am still experimenting to see if  I can prevent from using it.
3. My sending unit broke again so I can’t actually tell how much fuel I have.  Its not a big deal I just check it every couple of days.  But I wish it worked…  I can’t find the little part that fell off.  I’m not sure what to do about it.
4. Need to replace the last two glow plugs, and preferably put in a block heater for winter.
5. I’d really like to do a coolant flush and replace my injector nozzles.
6. Oil change of course.

Thats the easy list :)  I’m hoping I can make some head way on all of it.  I also have a .5 LPM on demand hydrogen electrolyzer installed for a thousand miles.  It was not enough hydrogen to make a really noticeable improvement in performance or mpg that I could tell but I am shooting for 3LPM next.  Wish me luck on that one!

I have a very similar truck,  I also have a 97 ram 3500 automatic with the cummins turbo diesel.  I average about 16-17mpg with flatbed and toolboxes.   I have since taken the tool boxes off and now I am looking for anything I can do to increase the mpg.  This is a great article albeit short and simple.

http://www.dieselpowermag.com/tech/general/0708dp_1997_dodge_ram_3500_dualie_cummins/index.html

I have been able to get permission from two Chinese buffets to get some grease.   It is very expensive here in upstate New York to have the grease taken away.   So most places I approach seem more than happy to let me have it.   Most places already have someone who collects it though and I won’t mess with that.   If I go through the time and expense of putting in a barrel with a lid and filter I don’t want someone else taking my oil so I won’t touch theirs.   I have strong feelings about this very subject.  Once Diesel went above $4.00 I saw some things change in the Bio fuels community.   Many people quit sharing and helping each other out.  Barrels and dumpsters got locks and it almost looked like some of the once strong online communities became ghost towns over night.

Needless to say I did not like what I saw,  I feel strongly about securing my own personal sources of oil but I do not want to participate in further destroying this community.  I won’t touch other collectors oil.  And I will continue to try to help each other out.  Soon as things slow down a little bit on my house project I am going to volunteer at the local bio-diesel coop.  It sounds like they need more people to keep up with the filtering.

Also, I was able to score about 60 gallons of moderate quality WVO from the two buffets I mentioned earlier.   I will need to use this oil pretty soon on a couple road trips so I built a very temporary solar heater that fits about 12 cubies almost perfectly.   I did this by stacking some chunks of concrete and rail-road ties in the shape of a U,  put the cubies inside on a pad of reflectix foam insulation and just laid a bunch of scrap windows I had laying around that I have aquired via free-cycle and it seems to be working quite well I will post some pictures soon!

I am currently looking into braised plate heat exchangers.   I am looking for a small one to put in just before my 12v vegtherm.   My system is heated really well and can even over-heat with my 12v in line and looped return.  But right now my drive short distances of no more than,  5-10 miles now.  I can never get up to temp unless I warm the car.  I removed all my hose insulation when I was in Nevada earlier this summer because of over heating but now I need to add it back and do something else to.   Another problem is that if you include all the hose and volume of wvo in my filter housing etc  Its at least 1.5 quarts of wvo that I have to burn ‘cold’.

I might get a faster heat-up if I unloop the return since I have hose in hose but that is a hassle.   If I leave the return looped the fuel flow will be very slow through the heat exchanger before the IP so the 12v heater can actually boost it above coolant temps almost instantly.  My veg therm is good for about 6-8F rise.  If I can get my veg temps to be 8F above the exact coolant temps almost instantly It might halve my diesel usage right now.  I have found some cheap exchangers on ebay like this one:

http://cgi.ebay.com/S-10-Plate-Brazed-Heat-Exchanger-SVO-Water-Therminator_W0QQitemZ250280466796QQcmdZViewItem?hash=item250280466796&_trkparms=72%3A552|39%3A1|66%3A2|65%3A12|240%3A1318&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14&timeout=1218627981832

But I am not sure if its performance,  I don’t need much… Since I run a looped return the wvo will move slowly through this exchanger letting me use a smaller one with a lower BTU output.

I will let you know how it all goes!

It has been a month and a half since I have had my 300D with me.  I had to leave it in northern Indiana while I moved.   Some extremely adventuresome and generous friends flew out and picked it up and drove it back to upstate NY where I am.  She got to me in one piece and seems happy as ever.  The car sat unused for 5-6 weeks.   I expected some issues with the veggie system.  At least a air-leak or something but the system worked on the first flip of the switch without a single complaint.  Fantastic!

In my down time I have been working on putting together a conversion for my Dodge ram 3500 work truck but the lack of money has caused me put that on the shelf for now.  I have also been experimenting with On demand supplemental Hydrogen Injection… That is going to be a whole new page on this blog pretty soon.  Extremely exciting stuff and sooooo simple…

The time is coming up!   I will be converting my Dodge truck,  Hopefully I will get started in less than a month.  I need to use this truck and I need to quit buying pump diesel for all the obvious reasons.    Its a huge truck with a huge motor.    But the beauty of it is that it is higher off the ground,  there is more room to install everything and enough for a for a GIANT veggy tank.

I am thinking heavily about building a custom tank to allow me to use straight dumpster-fill,  Or at the very least some type of dumpster-to-tank filtration if I can’t afford a custom tank with a remove-able cover.  The 8Gal cell in my 300D is not enough to go anywhere in this truck at 15mpg.   I’d like the veggy tank to be at least 40 gallons.

I will be posting later some more detailed information.  Now I am for the time-being living in upstate New York I am going to try to tap the local experts before I do anything major.  I love to see new ideas!

I am now safely residing in a very sweet town in upstate New York.   Unfortunately I had to leave my 300D Behind in favor of driving my Ram 3500 Cummins Diesel truck to haul most of my belongings.  This truck is not yet converted to WVO.  But it needs to be…  It cost me roughly $250 to make the 650 mile trip…  $5.25 for pump diesel is insane when you get 14MPG.  Though 14mpg is fantastic for a 1 ton dually truck hauling a 16′ trailer with 6,000lbs on it.    Gotta love those cummins engines.  I hear its easy to convert but I have not really mapped out the process for this specific truck.

I do know that I need a robust cold-weather system with a extremely large WVO tank.  I am hoping at least 40-50gallons.  This could make hauling/snow plowing etc.  Much easier in the winter time.

I have a great deal of pictures to share I hope to upload them in the next few days since I am trying to slow my life down and smell the flowers.   My trip is now over,  New Jersey to the west coast and back to upstate New York,   and almost everwhere in between.  Over 8,000 miles on the open road almost entirely on dumpster-fill WVO.

I put new CV axles on the rear end of my 300D,  I got rebuilds from CVJ Axle out of Denver CO.  They seem to be a popular choice for Axle replacements for old Benz’s.  I was highly impressed!  The rebuilds looked brand new!  I am told I can expect these axles to last the life the car and I do not doubt it.

The mercedes shops wanted roughly $900-1200 to do this job.  Obviously this is way out of my price range so I had to find options.   I got the axles rebuilt for roughly $325.   I found a guy on craigslist who put them in for me for $200.  It only took 3 hours to do the whole job.   Not to mention we had a pizza break :)

I will come back later and update this post with some pictures when I have the time.    Soon I am off to northern Indiana where I am going to up-root the last of my previous life and begin life anew in upstate New York.   Wish me luck!

Its been a long week. But many projects have been completed. Most importantly a couple days ago we finished converting my uncles 240D 4Spd. It now has a two tank system using his stock tank as the grease tank with a 6 gallon fuel cell in the trunk for diesel. The system cost was fairly low considering time forced us to buy quite a few expensive fittings that we could have found much cheaper if we had the time. Here is brief system overview:

Here is inside the engine bay. You can see the Vormax (heated filter housing) the Pollak switching valve, part of the looped return and Vegtherm 12V inline heater. We choose to keep the sacrificial filter inline because I don’t think you can ever have enough filtration and have caught some gunk with mine. We found a source of harder/thicker walled filters that seem to handle the heat much better. they are also completely transparent.

Here is a brass manifold that we use to send heat to the Vormax (filter housing) and a coolant line that we send to the trunk of the car that serves to pre-heat the incoming oil in a hose-on-hose insulated line.

Here is the insulated coolant out and veggie in lines wrapped in insulation and heat tape, with the coolant return and veggie return ran next to it.   Ideally these lines would be less exposed but this car will never go off-road and there is few animals to hit here in the high-desert.  It is also very hard on these cars to find a better place then this (though they do exist) so we took the easy way out and ran them here.

Keep in mind this car is going to be driven near Las Vegas.  Winters here are fairly mild.  I believe Hose IN Hose is a superior way to do run lines.  But it is more expensive, harder to install and requires some fairly special/custom fittings to make it work properly.   If this car was going to be driven in a place that actually gets below freezing with some kind of regularity I would have done it.  But here I believe this will be good enough 98% of the time.

This is the brass manifold that we use to put the coolant back into the system.  You can see part of the ball valve behind the fittings.  That valve constricts the flow of coolant to the heater core.  When you restrict the coolant flow from the heater core it forces it to go through the lines for the WVO system.  It works extremely well.  The brass fittings on both sides of this system cost I believe $75 total.  If we had access to better hardware stores that sold the correct types of plastic fittings we could have built both brass systems for maybe $20.  Don’t get me wrong I like the brass but it isn’t required.

Here is the 6 gallon marine fuel cell we are using as our start/stop diesel tank.  And we bent some aluminum hose around the stock tank to add a small amount of heat to the veggie oil.  It isn’t much but we had the stuff so why not?  Considering this is not a cold climate I believe this is more than enough to keep the oil hot enough to flow after the car is properly warmed up.  Many people in these areas run single tank kits.

And that is it,  the control panel is in the console and I don’t have a picture of it yet!  I will discuss this car more along with posting more pictures soon.   We have a in-line temp sensor just before the Injection pump the WVO gets up to 170F very quickly,  Just a couple minutes after the system is turned on and stays even at 65mph with very little line insulation.   Later on a better fuel tank(s) scheme may be put into action along with more modifications.  This system was intended to work better thank a single tank for little additional cost.  The diesel fuel cell was only $30 for example.

So far it seems to be a very simple and robust system that is easy to understand and follow.  I am very happy with the results!

Here we go…

About 5 months ago after many years of ‘almost’ making it happen I converted a 1984 Mercedes Benz 300D to a Single Tank SVO or Straight Vegetable Oil system.  Allowing this car to run almost entirely on used/waste fryer oil.   Welcome to my web said the spider to the fly.