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. :(