Our Volksvegan Adventure

Our adventures in Oregon continue from Bend to Eugene and beyond. On the way to Eugene we stopped to camp near some hot springs and hiked into the springs for a nighttime dip. It was nice to soak our sore muscles after the big climb up Mt. Adams. The next day we met a cool couple at the campground and had breakfast with them before heading into Eugene.

Eugene is certainly an organic vegan’s paradise. The food was simply amazing! We ate at the Keystone Cafe, Cozmic Pizza, and Morning Glory, all wonderful places full of delicious vegetarian & vegan options and organic goodness. We also played disc golf in Eugene at a small city course, and on the way out at an awesome course in Dexter State Park. Eugene seemed pretty conscious, and had plenty of natural food stores, yoga centers, and progressive publications to read. We stocked up on organic food at a natural food store and camped once more near the hot springs, riding our bikes a few miles from the campground to the springs for another splendid nighttime dip.

After a couple of days in Eugene, we made our way to Crater Lake National Park. Neither of us had ever visited, and we were blown away by the beauty of the lake and the story behind it. Crater Lake was formed when Mount Mazama, a huge volcano, imploded over 7,000 years ago. It created a round deep lake rimmed by crater walls and mountains. Wizard Island sticks up out of the lake, itself a volcano cone. We took tons of pictures of the lake and the interesting volcanic geology surrounding it.

We spent all day exploring Crater Lake National Park, even taking a quick dip in the frigid waters of the lake! It was definitely refreshing, but we couldn’t last longer than a few seconds in the water. We also climbed Mt. Scott, the park’s highest point at 8,938 feet, for a great view of the lake and surrounding area. We camped in the park and headed out the next morning for Mt. Shasta, California.

It wasn’t long after leaving Crater Lake before we caught a view of Mt. Shasta, a beautiful 14,162 ft. mountain in the Cascades. We checked out the natural food store in the town of Mount Shasta, then headed up the mountain for some hiking. We hiked around the beautiful alpine Panther Meadows and up to Gray Butte. It was getting dark on the way down from the butte, but the almost-full moon lit our way. We camped on Mt. Shasta and did some more hiking the next day, but probably will save climbing it for a warmer season!

Mt. Shasta has a magnetic appeal to it, the mountain is beautiful and several local Native American tribes hold it sacred. We felt really drawn to the area and hope to return to at least climb the mountain, but it’s also on our list of possible places to move. For now we’re leaving for Lassen Volcanic National Park, then through Redding to Arcata. Then we’ll be heading down the coast, and we’re looking forward to some warmer weather!

As for the greasecar, we haven’t been having much luck finding filtered vegetable oil on the road so far. Everyone we’ve tried connecting with on FillUp4Free.com hasn’t responded yet. Our portable pump and filtration set-up was barely trickling oil through when we tried in Boise, and we figured that with colder weather (and thus colder oil), it wasn’t going to work well. So we’ve been looking for biodiesel and will probably end up buying some big jugs of virgin veggie oil now that we’re in California and diesel is a bit more spendy. We have discovered on this trip that although veg oil is great for long trips, sourcing it and filtering it can be difficult to do on the road. It definitely helps to have a home base where we can have a steady grease source, settle the oil for a while (to remove animal fats and hydrogenation), then heat it and filter it. It’s quite a process, and we’re pretty picky with the oil we’ll put in our baby, so it helps to have space and time to prepare the oil, which we just don’t have on the road. Hopefully we’ll find some fellow greasers along the way that can give us filtered and properly processed waste oil, otherwise we’ll have to stick to biodiesel and virgin veg oil.

We plan to leave on our ultimate volksvegan adventure two weeks from now. It’s time to move fast! This week is my last week of work, and I’ve been getting ready for the big yard sale this Saturday.

Seneca has been working on the bus of course. Today he is installing the auxillery battery (it fits perfectly under the driver’s seat). It will run the stereo, super-bright headlights, and anything plugged into the cigarette lighter socket (like my laptop!) so we don’t have to take power away from the main battery. Just a little added reliability is nice. Eventually we could get a solar panel that charges the batteries as well. If we had the money for that sort of thing…

We are also figuring out a more portable option for filtering grease on the road, and decided to get a new pump that can be powered by the bus (instead of having to plug it in) and it’s much smaller and more powerful. We’ll use the filters in casings that we have now, but Sen ordered one for the end that goes down to 1 micron. The picture shows Sen pumping grease into the tank with our new system. Clean grease is very important, especially now that our baby got a new engine.

And in other news, I recently bought a domain name for this blog, volksvegan.org. It’ll take a bit to set it up, but I’ll let you know when to update your bookmarks! I’m off to get ready and plan this trip!

For Memorial Day Weekend, we embarked on a journey to the Gorge Ampitheater for the Sasquatch Music Festival. Seneca recently installed a Mega-Therm heater for our veggie oil fuel line that ensures that the temperature of the oil is high enough, as well as an auxillery pump to help out the injection pump with processing veggie oil. So the 175-mile trip was a test of the newly upgraded greasecar system. And thanks to Seneca’s troubleshooting and work on the bus all day Saturday before we left, we made it to the Gorge and partway back on grease with no problems! WOOHOO!

Switching to grease went very smoothly, and the Mega-Therm heater really kicked in, heating the oil up to the ideal 175 degrees very quickly. We noticed that it has a tiny bit less power going up hills on grease compared to diesel, but that can be expected. Other than that, there was no noticeable difference in engine performance on grease. The bus enjoyed being vegan for the trip! Now all that needs to be finished for the grease system is mounting the switches and gauges to the dash.

The only problem we had was a bit of difficulty getting the bus to start. It takes several tries of cranking to get her going. Seneca thinks there may be some air getting into the lines, and plans to replace a connecter in the grease lines that seems a little cheapy. Also, we ordered some new glow plugs because those need to be replaced periodically and often problems starting indicate faulty glow plugs. So hopefully once those things are replaced she will start up more reliably. Diesels always have a little trouble starting in the cold, but we want her to be as reliable as possible.

We’re now just mostly working on small things to get the bus ready for our trip: fixing the curtains, replacing the interior upholstery, deep cleaning the inside, and working out the last kinks in the grease system and new engine. We’ve got a few more weeks before we hit the road, and were very happy that this test run of the grease system did so well. Yay for the volksvegan! May there be many more greasy miles ahead…

Seneca recently ordered a new engine for our bus! We got a 1.9 Litre VW Turbo Diesel that’s slightly used (about 30,000 miles). We’ll be basically doubling our horsepower! No more crawling up hills in second gear going 20 mph! Woohoo!

It took a bit of research and some advice from friends to arrive at our decision to get that engine. TDIs are pretty finicky with grease, so we decided to stick with a TD. We decided to get a 1.9 instead of a Turbo 1.6 so we’d have the extra power to tow a small trailer (full of grease!) and go on the highway without having a trail of honking cars behind us.

Our friend Steve will be helping Seneca with the installation, which they should be starting next week. I’m so glad we decided to invest in a new engine rather than dealing with the underpowered one that’s been giving us so much trouble. If only we’d done it sooner…

Once the new engine is in, Sen will finish installing an auxillary battery, change all the hoses so they’re bio-diesel ready, and we’ll put in the new upholstery. Then she’ll definitely be road-worthy, and possibly even worth living in! We plan to do a lot of traveling this summer, and we’re even considering storing or selling all our stuff and living life on the road in the bus for a while. Stay tuned!

Another great development in bio-fuels I heard about from Green Options is called “Greaseball Challenge.” It seriously doesn’t get much cooler than this: the Greaseball Challenge is a race from the USA to Costa Rica in vehicles running strictly on renewable fuels. And it’s a charity benefit. Their site describes the challenge:

The Greaseball Challenge is a charity biofuel car rally
from the USA to Central America. Inspired by the tradition
of the classic car race, Greaseball is a cross-continental
adventure promoting sustainability on a shoestring using
renewable fuels.
The inaugural Greaseball Challenge departs on April 1, 2007.
Armed with nothing but a sense of adventure and some
cheesecloth, five teams will drive 4,500 miles on grease power
from the USA to Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua
and Costa Rica.

I am so tempted to sign up for this thing! It’s fun to watch the racers’ progress on the Greaseball Challenge blog and live on the road vicariously. I’ve always wanted to drive down to Peru, I might just have to copy these Greaseballs and follow their route…

I was looking around online and ran across some fellow greasers. Some folks are so dedicated, they’ve made entire sites sharing their knowledge. They sound pretty darn smart to me, but then again I am not good with the mechanical/technical side of this stuff! Check out some fellow “greasers” and bio-fuel bio-neers!

Vegd VW: Learn how Dave converted his cars to run on Waste Vegetable Oil.

The Fry Guys show you how they converted their cars and have plenty of useful tips.

Dreamer Propulsion: learn how one greaser converted a Mercedes300D.

Veggie Caravan is a non-profit group who tours in veggie-fueled buses promoting alternative energy and sustainability.

David Henri tells the story of converting his 1981 VW Rabbit in this article.

I could go on listing quite a few groups and individuals who have converted their vehicles, and the internet is a main source of information for the bio-fuel community. Since WVO conversions are still rather “underground” and definitely a DIY-project, the free-speech zone of the Internet is a great place for individual greasers to share their stories and find information. Feel free to comment with other conversion stories or the sites of fellow greasers!

We made our first veggie-oil fueled trip this weekend to the Santa Barter Fair. It’s about 60 miles North, not a very long trip but a perfect one for trying out the grease system. It ran great on the way there on veg oil, but on the way back we lost power as we were going up a hill. We had to switch to diesel and it ran fine the rest of the way home as long as we stayed on the diesel. When we got home we discovered the veggie oil fuel tank was almost empty and that’s why we lost power. It’s pretty crazy cuz Sen filled it up with about 10 gallons before we left!

We have discovered the culprit though. At the shop last week the mechanic said that our injector pump is leaking and needs rebuilt. Ugh. So that’s what’s leaking, apparently it leaks more on veggie oil than diesel. We haven’t replaced our hoses & gaskets with non-rubber ones yet and we’re pretty sure that’s the problem. We did use some bio-diesel blends like B20 and it’s best to replace all the rubber if you’re using any bio-diesel because it will erode. So we kinda figured we’d have to do it sometime. Now Seneca is trying to decide whether we should fix the injector pump, replace it and all the rubber hoses/gaskets, or just get a new turbo engine. All options are going to be a bit spendy. I was warned that VW ownership meant one project/problem after another… I guess we should’ve expected it.

Here’s Seneca driving on the way to Santa. We had a great time at the barter fair. We’ve been going to it for about 4 years now, it’s a small fair but a lot of Moscow people go since it’s so close and so we always know a lot of people. I actually sold and/or traded quite a bit of soap and massage oil, and a couple pieces of jewelry as well! I handed out lots of PETA stickers, too. There was a potluck on Saturday night and a drum circle as always. I have some pictures up on My Flickr Page of the trip. Our next big adventure is planned for the second weekend in October, the Okanogan Family Faire near Tonasket, WA. It’ll be a 5 hour drive, so we may actually be packing extra grease, and we’ll be staying a bit longer. It’s a huge faire, and we’ll have a booth, so I gotta get busy with my crafting! Hopefully we can promote sustainable transportation and maybe even get some grease from the food booths at the faire!

Well, we didn’t get to take our maiden voyage this weekend. The bus is still in the shop, due to a couple other parts that needed replaced. It should be done tomorrow, so we’ll be taking our maiden voyage this coming weekend to the Santa barter fair (it’s only about an hour away). So sadly my parents didn’t get to check out the grease bus, but Sen & I will get to take our first grease-fueled trip in it together, and we’ll be able to camp in it all weekend. Joy!

I did take some grease-collecting pictures and will try to get those up soon. We’re getting pretty quick at it due to a fancy-pants filtration system that Sen & Andy set up to pump the grease out and through three filters so it’s ready to go in the tank. Now that we have 5 sources of grease, our exhaust will smell like a mix of Mexican food, Chinese food, greasy bar food, and hashbrowns!

I will be making the maiden voyage in the newly-converted greasecar this weekend! I’m going down to McCall to show off the bus to my parents, who used to own a very similar one. It’s going to be about 400 miles round trip, and Seneca anticipates that I should be able to make the whole trip on one full grease tank, about 15 gallons. This will be a test to see if the miles per gallon on grease are better or worse than regular diesel, on which we get about 30 MPG. Most “greasers” say they get similar or slightly better mileage on grease, so we’ll see. I will be hitting some mean hills though, with the itty bitty 1.6L engine I’m sure it will be slow. But it’s a great way to test out the grease system. The only thing I’m nervous about is that Sen isn’t coming with me, so I just hope we have no car troubles. Send me & the Volksvegan some good vibes for a safe trip!

We have now secured 3 regular sources for waste oil. We also found out who our competition was, there are a number of locals who make bio-diesel out of wvo, and they have set up agreements with the biggest restaurants with the best grease. So that sucks, but maybe they can learn to share. Until then, we get about 5 gallons a week from each of our three sources, although the timing on 2 are a little irregular. That should more than cover our in-town driving, since we rarely drive and do most errands by bike. We really want to get a stockpile saved up for road trips though. We’re taking the bus to a barter fair September 9-10 and another much farther one the second weekend in October. I’m excited to finally be taking some veggie-fueled trips, and the bus is perfect for barter fairs since we can camp out in it and set up a canopy on one side of it to use as a booth. I sell and barter with handmade gemstone jewelry and herbal soap & massage oil at the fairs.

Tomorrow we collect more grease (I’ll try to get pictures this time) and take the bus into the shop to have the belts replaced and hopefully get our temperature gage fixed. The temperature gage stopped working, and it’s pretty important, so if they can’t fix it we might have to take our maiden voyage a week later.

Well, we have a greasecar! Seneca finished up the greasecar kit installation on Friday. Here is the converted engine… the main additions are 2 valves and a fuel filter for the grease, and of course the hoses carrying grease from the tank. The wiring is a bit shoddy at this point because the wire that came with the kit was too short, so we gotta call greasecar to get a longer wire and re-do the wiring. I’m sure it’ll look much better since the wire we got is a single insulated wire, and it will be hidden under everything up to the front of the bus.

Before running on grease, we had to warm up the engine and time how long it took to purge veggie oil from the tank. When we stop the car, we’ll have to purge it first, so it’s good to know how long before we turn off the car we need to flip the grease switch off. We have a buzzer that warns us if we shut down without purging the lines, as well, but we still need to install it once we get the longer wire. Our purge time is pretty quick at about 40 seconds. In the picture, Seneca watches the veggie oil tank and waits for diesel fuel to start flowing back in, indicating the purge is complete.

We took our first test drive in the greasecar at last! We ran it on pure veggie oil instead of waste veggie oil for the first run, and just did a quick trip out to the park. She drove perfectly, and Sen says the engine sounds a bit quieter on grease. We even stopped to smell the exhaust to make sure it was truly on grease. The exhaust on grease smelled very mild and almost like nothing, it’s a bit more of a french-fry smell with used oil, but it sure beats diesel exhaust!

We’re quite excited about finally being up and running on grease! It was much easier than we thought to convert the bus, and hopefully we’ll have many veggie-fueled travels from now on. We’re not quite ready for a road trip yet, we need to get the wiring for the kit done properly, mount the gages a bit better, and get new tires and wheels put on the bus. Then, let the grease collection commence!