Posts Tagged ‘Travel’

Happy Day

Friday, August 8th, 2008

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…

Found the air-leak, vacuum line has been cut!

Friday, May 23rd, 2008

2 days of fairly dedicated trouble shooting have uncovered many things.

First,  My air leak was caused by several small holes cut into my small vacuum line that runs to my in-car gauge.   Some of the hoses slack must have gotten caught up near/in the hood hinge and it pinched it so much it cut up a large section of the hose badly.  I have spliced in a new section of hose and hope my fairly hasty fix will hold up.

Second,  Temperatures in excess of 180F warp/melt the small sacrificial filter.  You know the clear one just before the injection pump.  It usually only costs a few dollars at the auto-parts store.   Ideally in a good system this filter is almost not needed as nothing harmful should make it that far down the chain.   However I have noticed that on several occasions I have found black/slimy/flaky gunk starting to build up in the filter.   After some experimentation I discovered that this was coming from the diesel side of the system,  SCARY… the only thing I can think of is that the WVO contamination that happens over time with a 1 switch system like mine is clearing out more junk in the diesel loop?   So I have found a solution.  I found a re-usable filter housing with re-usable filters at a auto parts store here in Oregon.  It wasn’t cheap ($10.00) but I suspect it will save its cost in the next 6 months.   I boiled all the plastic components for 10 minutes in a rolling boil (212+ degrees?) and the parts did not even soften so I suspect they will hold up to my WVO temps.  I will post pictures as soon as I can.

Third,   That diesel is thick when its been contaminated to 50% or more with WVO at 40F.   After a severe hot snap of I think a almost record breaking 97F a few days ago last night it got down to 40 degrees here in downtown Bend.   I had only put 5 gallons of #2 Diesel in my tank roughly 5 weeks ago and driven 4,000+ miles.  The gauge was nearing empty but not totally.   Looking at the thickness of what I was pumping out of the diesel side I would say it was 50% or so WVO.    I am curious as to the possible harmful side effects to running so much WVO in the un-heated side of my fuel system.  When I am doing heavy town drivng I suspect half of my driving time is on Diesel not WVO.    Am I coking things up?  and if so how can I reverse the effects.

Fourth,  As soon as possible,  buy the largest bag of GOOD hose clamps I can find.  The cheap ones you get everywhere are just junk.  I have, maybe upwards of 50 of them in my system if you tighten them to much they can actually cause air leaks themselves not to mention they cut-damage the hoses.   Several different types of clamps exist.  I need to do more research.

Fifth,  It is lonely traveling,  alone.   I need some companionship in a dire way.   Having many lovers scattered about the continent is great when I can expect to see them soon,  But when I am not sure where I will be and for how long the distance starts to hurt.

4,000 Miles on WVO Update

Monday, May 5th, 2008

I drove about 4,000 miles on my single-tank PlantDrive system. The system uses a very large Racor filter. It is rated for I believe up too 4000-7,500 miles on very polished oil (read clean!) at a replacement cost of $33 a piece if you buy 3 at a time it is not a bad solution for people who want a simple hands off system and who live in a warm climate. At 7500 miles on a filter that is $0.66 cents for every hundred miles. Understand though that if you are using poorly filtered oil these filters will clog MUCH sooner. Mine became clogged around 2500 miles. Some of this clogging may have been due to the SVO-blend in my tank ‘cleaning’ some of the 24 years of Diesel crud from the tank. The oil I was using was by my standards clean but not as clean as I suspect would be recommended for max filter life. It was heat-settled for a month and filtered to 20 micron.

Unfortunately for me when the filter clogged, it clogged FAST. I was driving between Reno and Elko Nevada in January. Anyone who has made this drive can attest that not much exists here but 80 mile stretches of absolutely nothing littered with fantastic views. I found myself on the side of I80 in a driving wind cutting hoses in an attempt to by-pass to my Racor filter that clogged up with only 15 minutes notice of reduced throttle response.

I made it to Elko where I was able to install the new filter that I pre-filled with straight #2 Diesel and all was good from there. The rest of the driving was uneventful with the system performing amazingly well considering the weather.