A couple nights ago we parked the bus in a relatively affluent residential area. John was concerned that one of the locals would call the police and report a “suspicious vehicle.” It didn’t happen, though. I was unsurprised; roadtrippers who have experienced this in the past have usually been sleeping in regular campers or vans. If you see a black van just chilling on your block, then it could be practically anything, and there’s a chance that the person there could be trying to lay low. Travelers seem to draw more attention to themselves by attempting inconspicuousnes than hanging out in an obvious way.
We’re definitely obvious. The bus is simply too damn ostentatious to be the least bit suspicious. What home invader in his right mind would use a vehicle this unwieldy and conspicuous as his getaway ride? Besides, we’ve got the “juanway.org” spray-painted on the back bumper, and most thieves don’t give out contact info. For now, it keeps people from calling the cops on us. It also leads us to some opportunities we may not have gotten otherwise. When the others were filling up the tank of veggie oil in a restaurant parking lot, a guy named David who had been biking around the area came up to me and asked me about the bus. I gave him a little tour of the inside and explained what we were doing. By the end of it he was calling his sister in Charleston, South Carolina to see if she would be willing to put us up for the night some time when we were in that area.
I got picked up by the bus last night around 9 p.m. At first I felt an incredible rush. The bus was finally in motion. Unfortunately, a glitch in the veggie system that prevents it from going over 10 miles per hour. We left Middletown, but not Connecticut. Instead of driving into the night, we spent it in a Wal-Mart parking lot in Cromwell. Today we’re going to Cheney Technical Institute in Manchester to get Joe to look at the veggie system. Hopefully he can get it fixed quickly, and then we can get the hell out of Dodge … er, Connecticut.
I don’t consider last night a waste; we’re still out of Middletown, and have now spent our first full night on the bus. Sleeping on the bus will take some getting used to, but I’m confident it will happen.
By the way: with little else to do last night, we explored the massive Wal-Mart parking lot we found ourselves in, and discovered:
That's Xaq. Not pictured: Me completely speechless.
The whole of my earthly possessions for the duration of the summer. If I've overpacked, it's because I have no idea how to pack for something like this, and I doubt very many people do.
One department where I know for certain I’ve overpacked: reading material. I have a small stack of books I’ve been meaning to read, and forcing myself to choose between abandoning David Foster Wallace or Ken Kesey was a little too much for me to take. But it’s all for the best, since even if I don’t get to every book I bring along (which I obviously won’t), they’re all going into the communal Anne Marie library, which all passengers are free to contribute to and borrow from. At some point in the near future I’ll provide a full inventory of the library and an update on what everyone’s reading so you can quietly judge our taste in literature.
Anne Marie must have gone through four or five total layers of paint to get to where she is right now; during the first couple of days of painting last summer, John just asked anyone who wanted to bring some cans of spray paint and do whatever they wanted. Then, later, almost all of that was painted over by the more artistically inclined to make the bus’s aesthetic a little bit less chaotic. You can see the result on Flickr; I would go so far as to describe it as damn fine.
But there were a couple of windows that had been spray painted over that we were still unsatisfied with. So while we re-installed the veggie tank and unbolted the fridge, Dan (left) and Peter (right) were trying to figure out what to replace it with. They considered everything from cuneiform to some kind of molecular symbol, but in the end, they decided the simpler the better. So while a group of four people held Dan’s half-naked, splayed body up to the window, Peter traced around it, using him as a human stencil. The result is what you see above. The t-shirt wrapped around Dan’s head was to prevent him from the paint fumes.
Via John, here’s some video of the magic happening:
Getting that window covered was one of the very last pieces sliding into place. By the time you read this, we’ll probably already be on the road.
Make no mistake: the bus is effectively done, in terms of construction. We’d already be well on our way into the South if it weren’t for one technical glitch with the veggie system ( I don’t totally understand it, but which John assures me it’s easily fixable) and the DMV. John and others have been to the DMV twice so far, and each time they’ve rejected the bus for registration as an RV based on increasingly weird regulations they didn’t think to mention the first time around. So to make them happy, we’ve had to:
Paint over as much of the remaining school bus yellow as we could, so that we couldn’t accidentally kidnap any children who mistook our giant hippie bus for their ride to school and hopped on board at a stop sign.
Install a space heater, to keep us comfortable through those frigid summer nights in Texas.
Install a refrigerator.
Remove the veggie system.
That’s right: apparently the veggie system can’t be in the passenger compartment. And since the bus is pretty much all passenger compartment, that means that it can’t be in there at all. Once the bus is registered as an RV, of course, the veggie system gets bolted back in and the fridge and space heater get promptly unbolted.
In case you haven’t noticed, Campus Progress isn’t paying me to cover this road trip because of my extensive automotive expertise. Nonetheless, I’m going to take a stab at explaining just how the bus runs on vegetable oil.
There are two hurdles to overcome with straight veggie oil before you can combust it: first, you usually get it unfiltered. If you’re picking up your fuel at a less FDA-friendly restaurant, you can find all kinds of gross stuff floating around in their veggie oil; rat poo, for example. Needless to say, you don’t want that in your engine.
As a result, Anne Marie’s fuel system has a whole bunch of anti-rat poo mechanisms in place. The first is that when we collect the fuel from the tanks, we use a suction wand which we place a couple inches below the surface of the oil–since crap (both literal and figurative) either floats to the top or sinks to the bottom, the center is the clean part you want to collect from.
If our day tank is already full, we dump that fuel into the bulk tank for use later. Both the bulk tank and the day tank have filters in place, so as it passes from one to the other it gets more and more refined. So the filtering problem is taken care of.
The next problem, fortunately, isn’t quite as gross; it’s an issue of viscosity. Veggie oil is too viscous to be processed effectively by a diesel engine, so its viscosity needs to be lowered to a level roughly equivalent to diesel fuel. This is done by heating it while it’s pumped towards the engine. Once it’s less viscous, it’s then filtered even more, before finally reaching the engine. And like in a normal diesel engine, any leftover fuel is pumped back around towards the tank.
One more cool thing about the fuel system: you’ll notice in some of the photos and video that there’s a complicated-looking instrument panel the bus driver has to fiddle with before beginning to drive. That’s because the diesel and veggie systems actually operate independently of one another. If there’s an emergency with the veggie oil system, that means we can always switch back to old-fashioned fossil fuel if necessary.
The two systems both connect to the engine at the supply line (where fuel gets pumped in) and the return line (where excess fuel is pumped out). So in order to start running on veggie oil, the driver needs to hit three switches: he starts the pump which will send veggie oil to the engine, then hits switches for the two valves controlling the supply line and the return line, so that only veggie oil enters and returns from the engine.
And then–voila–you get yourself some veggie oil-fueled motion.
Okay, so the first interstate voyage of the souped-up Anne Marie (versus her trip from Minnesota to Connecticut in unmodified, school bus form) didn’t go so great. I wasn’t there, but I got the gist of what happened. In short: technical difficulties.
The good news is that, as John says, the bus has a new pump, and one that shouldn’t overheat again at that. Word on the street is that there’s another test run to New Hampshire scheduled for mid-this week, and that one I will try to be on. Then, once we return to Middletown having successfully demonstrated that we can cross state lines without having Anne Marie lapse into a coma, the long-term voyage will begin in earnest.
Stay tuned.
Photo by Flickr user somjuan used under a Creative Commons license.
Sometimes in conversation about the bus I’ll frequently make the mistake of referring to biodiesel and the veggie oil we use to power it interchangeably. But there’s an important distinction, there; biodiesel is processed to run inside your average diesel engine, while straight vegetable oil (SVO) is exactly what it sounds like: straight-up french fry grease that can only be used in a specially modified engine. The modifying itself wasn’t easy (more on that later), but regular vegetable oil is a lot easier to get ahold of on the road than biodiesel.
That’s because any restaurant that uses veggie oil in bulk is super eager to get whatever’s left over off their hands anyway. Places like McDonald’s, or Chinese restaurants that use a lot of the oil generally pay people to take it off their hands. We’re offering to take it for free, filter it, and use it to power Anne Marie. Not only is this a hell of a lot cheaper than having to pay to fill up the tank with diesel wherever we go, but it goes without saying that it’s infinitely more environmentally sound.
Perversely, we have a pretty strong incentive to hope that the vast majority of people stick to fossil fuels, at least for the duration of the trip: The more people run their vehicles on veggie oil, the more restaurants will catch on and start charging people for their waste. So you’ll just have to take my word for it when I say that’s not why I’m ambivalent over SVO as a one-size-fits-all alternative to fossil fuels.
I’m just not convinced there’s enough veggie oil to go around were there to be a large-scale conversion to people running on the stuff. So while it might be tempting for the environmentally conscious to see an SVO-powered bus as representing things to come, I’d wager that these souped-up greasemobiles are going to continue to be isolated cases with very little large-scale application.
Photo by Flickr user jamesjyu used under a Creative Commons license.
That’s one of the more common questions I get about the bus. I usually respond, “Pretty much all of us.” The next question is usually, “Wait, don’t you need a special license for that?”
Yes and no. You need a special license to drive a school bus–but none of us are doing that, thanks to a really clever idea from John. Basically, when the bus gets registered with the DMV (it’s currently got a temporary registration, pending the permanent one for the trip itself), it’s going to be registered as an RV rather than a bus. That’s because it will fulfill all of the legal requirements to count as a Recreational Vehicle; it will have bedding, a power source besides the car battery, and even extremely rudimentary plumbing. And lucky for us, the DMV in its infinite wisdom recognizes that while I might not be qualified to drive a bus, I am eminently qualified to drive an identical vehicle that just happens to have bunk beds on the inside.
That said, I’m probably going to do as little driving as possible, except when we’re on abandoned stretches of highway in the Southwest. Ali and John are the more experienced hands when it comes to maneuvering Anne Marie and, while I like to think of myself as a pretty safe driver, I’m going to defer to them on most vehicles larger than a Honda.
I'm Ned Resnikoff, a writer for Campus Progress. I, along with some of my high school buddies, will be driving a school bus turned veggie oil-fueled makeshift RV across the continental United States over the summer. We'll keep you updated on our trip and what we see along the way.
Pretty amazing that whoever wrote my FOL textbook doesn't understand the difference between "as large as" and "at least as large as."
about 3 hours ago from Brizzly
Someone good at that sort of thing should remake Nosferatu, package it as a Twilight ripoff, and traumatize a generation of filmgoers.
about 6 hours ago from Brizzly
