Getting a school bus-sized vehicle running on veggie oil is harder than it looks, especially if you’re working from scratch. Sure, John has a pretty impressive faculty for reserve engineering, well, anything, but none of us are professional mechanics, and most of us are about the furthest thing you could imagine from a professional mechanic (assembling an IKEA bed is the closest I get to any sort of engineering prowess). Plus, the parts needed to put together a whole new fuel system are fairly expensive, to say the least.

It was always John’s intention to get Anne Marie running on veggie oil, and it’s arguably her most important feature. But I’m not sure that it would have happened without Joe Hollay and the good people at Cheney Tech–in fact, I think it’s fair to say that being discovered by them was one of our luckiest breaks yet.

It all started last summer, when the bus started to get a little bit of local press coverage. The local FOX affiliate aired a segment in July.

Luckily for us, Joe Hollay was watching the segment. Joe works at Cheney Technical Institute in Manchester, CT, where he teaches high school kids how to work on diesel engines for a living. In technically challenged layman’s terms, he’s an expert at making school bus-sized vehicles run good. And for whatever reason (I like to think he was moved by the FOX segment’s funky as all-get-out soundtrack) he decided he wanted to help us out.

For the duration of the previous school year, Anne Marie sat in Cheney Tech’s garage and Joe and his students worked on converting it to run on veggie oil free of charge. Joe even got his hands on some spare auto parts the National Guard had thrown away. Not only did that further defray the cost of conversion for John, but having military hardware on the inside makes Anne Marie seem that much more badass.

In early January, I had the opportunity to accompany John to Cheney Tech and check in on the progress Joe and his students were making. Plus, I finally got to meet Joe himself; he’s an unbelievably friendly, intelligent guy. And I’m not just saying that because everyone on Anne Marie owes both him and his students our undying gratitude.

I took some video of him explaining his modifications to John and I. Check it out:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4