Category: Cars

This is a Fiat Abarth 1000 I saw at Amelia Island a few years ago. Hard to make a guessing game since it is wearing a nametag! “Hello, my name is: Fiat Abarth 1000” 😉

Pretty little car, eh?

If you guys want to challenge your car guessing skills have a go at the pair in the background.

The first step in making BioDiesel is collecting your “feedstock”… that is the vegetable oil used to make it. I use Waste Vegetable Oil (WVO) from restaurant deep fryers. It is darn near impossible to get it from around home, as there is a commercial BioDiesel producer within 10 miles of my house who has locked up all the local sources. Instead I collect it closer to work. Right now I have two sources, which are part of a small cooperative really. My friend John, who I met when he replied to a job I posted on Craigslist many, many years ago, and a new source Mike, who I met via the Northwest BioDiesel discussion mailing list. Both of them supply me with waste oil, and in return I supply them with finished BioDiesel.

John first turned me onto the idea of running the car on veggie oil. At first I did straight veggie oil in the car, mixed with petroleum Diesel. I built a two-barrel WVO filter setup that was completely gravity operated. For a year or two I just filtered the oil down to 1 micron (which took a lot of time BTW) and poured it in my tank at anywhere from 10% to 50% mixture based on ambient temperatures. This worked OK for a while, but did eventually clog one of my injectors. This, and the rising price of oil, is what prompted me to go 100% BioDiesel.

So step one is still filtering and settling. However unlike the old days, I don’t have to be so anal in my filtering (that still happens, just later.) Now I collect the oil, which comes to me in 5 gallon buckets, and pour it into these two tanks you see above. I can filter/settle close to 100 gallons of WVO at a time here. Time & Gravity are my main tools. The oil goes into the top via funnels. Attached to the funnels are coarse filters which remove the larger food bits (whole fries, potato bits, etc) from the oil. I use paint strainers, old panty hose, socks, whatever. Panty hose is actually the best. The filter media eventually clog with sludgy gunk, but we’ll worry about that later. Once inside the barrels the oil sits for at least a week, preferably two weeks. As it sits the water that was in suspension falls to the bottom of the tank. Suspended food particles also sink.

You will note that the barrels are upside-down, with the dual-bung tops now on the bottom. Into these bungs I have plumbed two NPT-threaded 3/4″ pipes with ballvalves on the end. One has an extension that sticks up into the oil to the level of the line you see drawn on the front of the tank. The other is flush with the tank’s bottom. When I draw off oil I use the higher of the two pipes. This means I draw oil from the area above the sediment. I can drain off the water and sediment using the bottom/flush pipe. This stuff is unusable and is discarded. The oil goes from the settling tanks straight into the BioDiesel reactor.

Up until last week I used a removable hose to drain the oil from these tanks. The hose screwed onto the ball valves you see on the end of the pipes. Last week I finally installed some plumbing to make this operation a lot cleaner. Now I’m not dripping WVO as much. I can just open some valves and flick on the reactor’s pump. Oil just flows into the reactor vessel without getting my hands dirty! (There are still some hoses to connect, but these are further downstream.)

So the key here, and the key overall to this whole process, is time. The longer the WVO sits, the better and cleaner the oil becomes. I alternate which tank I use every weekend, allowing the other to sit another full week to settle. I come close to filling each one every week, so the supply is consistent.

The next steps in the are testing & reaction, also known as “Better living through chemistry!”
Stay tuned for that.

What would you think leads most people to this website?
Guessing games about oddball old cars? Nope.
Stories about vintage car rallies? Nope.
Commiserating about unscrupulous mechanics? Nope.

When I look at my website stats the #1 search term month after month is “WVO Filtering”… pretty odd stat for a site mostly about my noodling about with a gasoline-powered vintage car eh? I guess people are more interested in my mundane daily habits than my occasional sunny-day passion. Oh well. So I’ve decided to give the people what they want.

I’ve been slowly building and trying to perfect a small BioDiesel processing system out in my barn, and while I’ve mentioned it a couple of times before here I promise over the next few weeks to lay out what is involved, and what components are used. Unlike my “beauty shots” of old cars that usually grace this website, I’m going to be honest with you, this stuff is ugly. Making BioDiesel from waste vegetable oil is a filthy, dirty job. As a result, the area where I do this dirty job is not very pretty.

Let me remind everyone of one important point: I’m not doing this to save the planet. I do this to save my wallet. You can call it enlightened self-interest, but really it is just an expression of independence. I’ve driven Diesel cars for a long time; half the cars I’ve owned in life have been powered by Diesel engines. I’ve done this because they are efficient and frugal… sort of like me. 😉 This process is no different in nature.

I’ve always been curious about things mechanical, and so embarking on this particular journey seemed natural, though it has been a slow process. I’ve had help from other people along the way, and I’ll try to mention them here. I am by no means finished, and I know as things evolve they’ll improve, so don’t view this as a definitive series on homebrewing.

Stay tuned as I explain it all starting from the beginning.

Right before Shaun left last summer after the GTTSR he took all my raw footage from the week and stitched it together into one huge QuickTime movie. I finally had some time to edit out the weird bits (like when the boot was open and the camera was staring at the tonneau, or several places where the camera fell off the mount, and longs bits at lunch times) time-compress it EVEN MORE, and set it to music.

Eight days of driving in ten minutes. Enjoy!

Olympia to Seattle in 2 Minutes from finkbuilt on Vimeo.

You can read detail about this timelaspe from the source blog here.

Very nostalgic, as it captures the pre-boom Seattle that I miss so much. HOV lanes? Nah. The Rainier Brewery. The Kingdome(!) Makes me want to watch Almost Live reruns.

In 1988 I was living in Ballard and working in Bellevue. Sue & I were married that summer. Note the shocking lack of traffic. Other than the perpetually under-construction I-90 project over Mercer Island I don’t remember traffic being an issue anywhere around town back then. How times have changed.

This also feeds my well-known lust for driving timelapses. 🙂

Thanks to Roger for the hint on the link. The blog itself has some good stuff in it too – obviously a kindred spirit.

I spent the evening after dinner adding plumbing between my various BioDiesel processing gear. I should have it finished tomorrow. The whole system is composed of:

• 2 Settling tanks where waste veggie oil (WVO) sits to separate out water and silt.
• 1 “Appleseed” processor where the chemical reaction takes place
• 1 Wash tank, where the BioDiesel sits post-processing, then gets washed

I’m also building a drying tank for post-wash removal of residual water. Previously I let it sit in a barrel, but now that I’m supplying fuel for 3 people/4 cars I need to accelerate the process a bit. (I share my output with my friend John, and now with another guy Mike, who both supply me with sources of WVO. WVO is tough to find as there is a large commercial BioDiesel producer near me who has locked up all the supply!)

Anyway, up until now I’ve moved oil from the settling tanks to the processor, and from the processor to the wash tank with a hose. I also move the finished BioDiesel from the wash tank to the final settling/filtering barrel with 5-gallon “cubie” bottles. Not exactly the most efficient, or the cleanest way of doing things! The hose was a PITA to use, and always dripped oil everywhere when I removed it from the fittings. It also leaked unless I got all the fittings perfect.

Now I’ll be able to move oil, and finished BioDiesel around using pipes and the Appleseed’s pump, by turning ball valves. It all looks pretty Rube Goldberg-ish, but it should actually simplify the work, and keep my work area a LOT cleaner.

The processor is lower than the WVO settling tanks, so gravity, plus the pump will help fill the processor. The final settling/filter barrel is higher however, and a fair distance away, so I will likely be adding a second pump to the system before it is complete.

I’ll take some pictures when I’m done.

I had to share.

The Jaguar Clubs Of North America hold three competitive events nationwide, Concours (bleagh), Rally, and Slalom. The latter is frankly the ONLY reason I pay my JCNA dues every year. I’d rather have a root canal than actually *compete* in Concours. I love TSD rallying, but only one of the three JCNA clubs around here (the Canadian XK Register) actually bothers to do real rallys. But Slalom (the world JCNA uses for auto-cross) is a ton of fun.

The concept is simple: Identical course and timing gear throughout North America. Distinct classes for the various models. The playing field therefore is VERY level and driver skill is the real test, and you can compare yours against everyone on the continent. They have a non-Jaguar class too, which is comprised usually of sports and muscle cars and it is cool to see both shows up, and what does well. I had what I thought was a most unusual Slalom participant posted here before, but the one above literally takes the prize.

Of all the tools to bring to an autocross, a BMW Isetta is not on the top of the list. Note the stellar handling! 😉

I hope to bring my TDI Jetta to a slalom this year and set the bar for a Bio-Fueled vehicle.