Thread: Deisel converted to veggie oil

Anybody on this post experiment with deisel cars converted to Waste Vegetable Oil (WVO). I'm interested in playing around with this and would like to see if anyone else has delved into this arena before. Thanks.

Got into this and Biodiesel when I was 16. You need to first secure a nice waste oil source before even bothering. When I started, it wasn't that main stream and it was easy to have a restaurant hand you over their oil for free. Now, most of them have recognized the opportunity and will charge a certain price per gallon, just to have you pump and filter their nasty stale french fry and burger fat incrusted grease. Anyways, if you find a good source of oil, you will need to have a secondary tank installed in your car to hold the waste veg oil (wvo). The oil needs to be heated up to a certain temperature the be effectively burned in the engine. Usually this is done by routing the engine coolant through the tank in a radiator. When the engine is started up on either Biodiesel or regular diesel and has heated up the wvo to a workable temperature, a switch is engauged to route the wvo into the engine. At the end of your trip, before turning off the engine, the switch needs to be placed back to the startup fuel choice until all of the wvo has burned out of the engine as to not have it congeal when it cools. Biodiesel has something like 7% horsepower loss than regular diesel, but it has a cleaning effect and can help your diesel engine last much longer. I'm not sure about straigh wvo, but its something like 12% I want to say.

What about the filtering and cleaning process

first stage filtering for me was a few layers of panythose over the inlet on a hand crank pump, this was loaded on my dads truck and when home I used simple home water filters in 2 stages of smaller micron levels. After I made my biodiesel and drained out the glycerine, i would wash it with water and drain to get out all unreacted reagents. There is some powdered magnesium chemical you can sprinkle on top to do the same thing chemicaly. Thats about it. I strongly suggest using biodiesel in conjunction with the wvo as your start/stop fuel because it will clean out any veggie gunk in your engine. Most people think the conversion to run off straight biodiesel is hard and expensive, its as simple as replacing your fuel lines with synthetic hose that wont break down from the detergent qualities of the fuel and changing your fuel filters regularly at first becuase all of the gunk it breaks free.

Good luck on finding a source of the waste oil. Around here it's virtually all under contract to processors of Bio Diesel.. Also I would assume that in order to do this past the experimantal stage. You would have to have a number of resturants to source from since I doubt that any one resturant would go through enough oil in a week to match any real demand.

I have a "box o parts" from when I was going to experiment with this over 10 years ago but never got to it (kids came along and then I got rid of the diesel truck). I have an inline heater and all the switching mechanisms for switching between your diesel tank and a veggie tank (outboard motor fuel tank). I've scavenged some of the small electronic bits over the years but most of it is there.

If you want it I would probably sell it all for $100 and you would be pretty far along in your project. I'm not sure if I have any instructions but if you are a decent mechanic then you would be able to figure it out. Send me a PM if you are interested.

Thank you all for the info. PBin... I'll keep your parts in mind if I find a good car. The one I was looking at was just plain worn out.

Well my knowledge is limited to VWs, I would suggest checking all the seals, a lot of the seals and o-rings use the lubrication in diesel to prevent cracking and breaking. Depending on how old the rig is and what make it is they also make fuel warmer kits that you can buy (aftermarket of course) and of course some on some of the newer diesels the manufactures say that you can use B5-B10 and still have a valid warranty. I would also suggest changing your fuel filters often... either ever tank or every other tank for the first few fill ups, then every 5k-10k after that.

If I were to convert one over to bio myself, ideally I would want an older toyota truck, although it would take quite a bit of work (and trial and error) to convert one since to my knowledge they dont sell the diesels in These United States.

Just my 2 cents....

Check these guys out:

Shade Tree Conversions at Shade Tree Conversions.

They convert trucks to run with tractor diesel engines.

There have been other people that have converted cheap chinese diesel farm tractor engines to work with compact pickups.

If you got the time and initiative it would be a fun project - you'd probably have to live somewhere that doesn't do emission inspections.

Don't tell "The Man" about this...the minute you bypass paying their excise tax (the tax applied to fuel to drive on the road with the government's permission) and drive on the road you have broken the law. So be careful who you brag about this with.