GreaseDrive

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!

After parking the car yesterday after a hour long drive in the ’searing’ 90+ heatwave that has stricken most of the west I think I have a filter clogged or some type of heat related damage. (maybe the small clear filter warped?)  Ever since looping my return I have been able to sustain final temps of 160F+ about 10 minutes after car has reached full operating temp.  This means that for at least 10 minutes I am driving on cooler WVO than I should be, but it is unclear how much/any damage could be caused by fairly short amounts of time at lower temps.

I am going to work on the car shortly and try to figure out what the issue is.  I will keep you posted.  I suspect it is just the small clear filter getting clogged,  but I did not notice a lack of vacuum or any other signs of flow-loss.   Hmmmm…

*UPDATE*

I have the battery on a charger,  After changing the little filter wich had some gunk in it but was not clogged.  (how is gunk getting that far in the system?!!)  I seemed to have pulled a air-bubble into the IP and of course its air-bomed.   I ran the battery low trying to purge the bubble, but it is barely getting any fuel and I am not sure why.   I’m going to go and give it another go shortly.   I know that my diesel tank is heavily contaminated with WVO simply because I have not added more #2 in over 5,000 miles of driving and the tank is low.  That maybe part of the problem also.

I drove again today,  this time 10 miles across town and after the drive before I switched to diesel my temp was only 139F,  Much too low even with my looped return and 12V heater.   I am going to have to dig into this tomorrow.  I wonder what could make a good insulator for all the hoses.  Normal pipe wrap is much to thick.   Any ideas?