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Posts Tagged ‘veggie oil’
August 4th, 2009
by Ned
Arizona is perhaps the most desolate state we’ve traveled through thus far. This is by no means a bad thing—the stark beauty of the surrounding landscape is just as awe-inspiring as it was in New Mexico and West Texas. But it does mean that there’s a lot of ground to cover in between each sign of civilization, and most of the towns we passed through were little more than a strip of road with a few restaurants.
The two exceptions we encountered before Phoenix were Winslow and Flagstaff. Flagstaff in particular was a very strange place. It was by far the greenest town we encountered in Arizona, thanks to a remarkably high altitude that made the nights there chilly even by the standards of us as New Englanders. And while we only saw the Wal-Mart, we got the impression there of a diverse, endearingly oddball community, shaped in large part by the proximity of Northern Arizona University.
Exhibit A: We were in the Flagstaff Wal-Mart for all of two minutes, surrounded by RVs, before we got a friendly knock on the door. A beefy, talkative guy with a scraggly beard bounded onto the bus and introduced himself as Pockets. He was traveling with his friend, Shadow, and their dog, in a van that they had been living out of for years. Pockets called us “family,” saying, “I knew there would be family in this parking lot,” and asked us if we had been at the gathering that year—meaning the massive flash-hippie commune known as the Rainbow Gathering. We said that we had not, and he launched into an involved description of his various debaucheries and hallucinogenic experiences over the course of the gathering.
Later, after the Sun Dance and the Grand Canyon, we rolled through Flagstaff once more on our way to Phoenix, in search of veggie oil. Unsurprisingly, the downtown was really cool—depending on who aboard the bus you ask, it was almost as interesting, or more interesting, than downtown Asheville, North Carolina. The music shops, food and street performers were all great, but the best part for us was that everyone seemed to genuinely like the bus; it felt like we were surrounded by friends. Or, as Pockets had put it, family.
Tags: Arizona, Flagstaff, Phoenix, veggie oil, Wal-Mart, Winslow
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July 30th, 2009
by Ned
 Sadly, we had to drop Audrey (pictured, right) off at the airport before departing from Albuquerque. Once she was gone, it was just me, Ali, Peter and John—the core group, the people who had been on the bus from Day 1 and stayed the whole time.
After departing the airport, we headed for Gallup, New Mexico. Along the way, we passed through the Pueblo reservation which resident Leslie Marmon Silko described in her book Ceremony. Peter, who was reading the book at the time, hopped off the bus and asked some locals if the knew her. They knew the Silko family, they said, but Leslie had moved a while back.
That encounter was the first indication that we were in Native American territory. As we trundled along, a sign pointed out for us that we were now in Navajo County.
Gallup isn’t technically on a reservation, but we were clearly in a heavily Navajo town. As if to underscore how distinct from the rest of New Mexico the town is, they don’t observe daylight savings time—meaning that, while we were there, we were closing to pacific standard time than to the mountain time of the surrounding regions. That caused more than a little confusion.
There are, it seems, two Gallups, and we encountered people from both of them. The night after we stayed in their Wal-Mart parking lot, we headed out towards Highway 66 to hunt for some veggie oil. It was a discouraging trip—practically all of the restaurants we stopped at had oil that was too clogged and dirty to be usable. And the poverty of the neighboring residential areas was obvious. On multiple occasions, people came to the bus asking for food or money, and the people we saw on the street had the worn-down, dejected look of people living in a place where industry had collapsed.
We were eager to get out of there, but we not very much veggie oil and some other technical issues, we were forced to stay another night. Yet as frustrating as it was at the time, our extended stay actually turned out to be an unexpected stroke of luck.
Tags: Gallup, Navajo, New Mexico, veggie oil
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June 15th, 2009
by Ned
 From left to right: Lots and lots of mall, the guys eating dinner The first leg of this trip has been defined largely by big shopping centers. After spending far more time than any of us would have liked Friday morning in yet another Wal-Mart parking lot, we were back on the road. Driving, at least, was significantly easier this time around — we stayed off I-95 and took Route 1 straight through Philadelphia.
Anne Marie is an old bus, which means she can’t go for too long without a break. We had to stop in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, and while we were there we decided to take the opportunity to hunt for some more veggie oil to refuel. We ended up searching in yet another big shopping center: the absolutely massive King of Prussia Mall (see photo).
Here’s the thing: I, like most other people on the bus, have a visceral distaste for malls. It’s not just about standard-issue liberal complaints about rampant consumerism; the whole design aesthetic freaks me out. Not only are all malls the same identical sterile white, but they’re all deliberately designed to obfuscate and prevent you from leaving. As a result, we spent a lot of time wandering around completely lost in between hitting up what restaurants there were.
None of them had veggie oil–or they did, and had a corporate policy against handing it out for free. At some of the places, the employees just didn’t know, and didn’t want to take the time to find out. But Mike stumbled upon a goldmine when he hit up a nearby restaurant; the owner called up eight friends who also ran restaurants, and finally located a place south of King of Prussia in Brandywine Creek. The owner there said we could take the veggie oil, but he didn’t want to see or hear us — we just needed to go into the parking lot, take it, and get out. Heist!
A giant magic school bus isn’t the most inconspicuous vehicle for a caper. So when everyone on the restaurant’s patio gawked at us, one of the guys working there came out to talk to us. His name was M.J. Masterson, a pony-tailed former graffiti artist and veggie oil-powered vehicle enthusiast himself. He told us we were welcome to the oil, and even recommended another place where we could get another 60 gallons or so.
Thanks to the kindness of a couple strangers and an easier route, it was a much less stressful day than the previous one. Plus, since we were out of Jersey and well on our way to exiting Pennsylvania, we were quickly nearing one of the parts of the country that we turned out for in the first place.
The Mason-Dixon Line was so close I could almost smell it. And then our veggie pump broke, so we went to Wal-Mart.
Tags: veggie oil
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June 10th, 2009
by Ned
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.
Tags: bus, veggie oil
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June 4th, 2009
by Ned
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.
Tags: bus, svo, veggie oil
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June 3rd, 2009
by Ned
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.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: building the bus, veggie oil
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June 2nd, 2009
by Ned
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.
Tags: biodiesel, bus, svo, veggie oil
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