Category: Cars

I am a “car guy”… I love old cars.

Car Photo of the Day: Maser

The above Maserati was seen at the 2008 New England 1000, being driven by the Rallymaster Rich Taylor.

In other news there will be no Jaguar pics tonight… I found out late last night that the JCNA slalom in Canada I intended to drive to this morning is actually going to be happening tomorrow. So today I’ll be doing all those things I planned to do Sunday. Namely make a batch of BioDiesel, fix our damn lawnmower (never. buy. Craftsman. ever. again.) Maybe cut the grass if successful.

At least it has cooled off. 61°F right now where as it was 90°F here yesterday.

BioDiesel news & BioDiesel shoes.

It is... orange.

I few weeks ago one of the guys in my small BioDiesel co-op dropped off a barrel of waste oil he collected from a restaurant. I was a bit taken aback when I looked at the oil as it had… some odd coloration. Usually a barrel of oil settles in a way so that the top few inches look like new. That is clear, bright golden-yellow oil. When I looked at this stuff it was sort of shocking orange, and very opaque… almost milky. I though perhaps it had been shaken up in transit and have left it sitting out by the barn for a few weeks to settle. My worst fear was that it wasn’t really oil at all. Next in line was that it had been contaminated with something. Water if of course the usual waste oil contaminant, but this looked… weird. So last weekend I took a 1-liter sample and made a small test-batch. The oil had settled and was mostly clear, but still VERY orange. The test batch is done at ambient temps so it takes a long time. I let it sit for five days and above is how it looks today. Still not “clear” (it is unwashed though) and still… very orange.

Next I’ll subject some to the 3/27 Conversion Test and see how it does. My gut feeling says it is “good” and that the coloration is just some artifact of whatever it is they are cooking. The oil comes from a Mexican food place, so perhaps it is excess paprika, or maybe Chorizo, which are the only Mexican cuisine items I can recall that are unusually orange in color.

If it tests out well I’ll mix it with the rest of my (normally colored) waste oil and make some BioDiesel from it. Maybe my exhaust will make people think of nachos instead of french fries now? We’ll see.

Speaking of Home Brew BioDiesel I figured I’d share one of the risks of this activity: Shoe dissolving.

My soles have vanished

BioDiesel is one of the world’s great solvents. It attacks rubber with the ferocity of a shoal of slow-motion piranhas. Exposure directly to vegetable oils literally makes rubber vanish. I only wear one pair of shoes when I work out in the barn around the waste oil and BioDiesel, and the above is a photograph of their current state. This is of course after many years of use, but I think it is time to retire them.

Car Photo of the Day: Guzzler

Yesterday I spoke about prominent things on car’s bodies that make aesthetic and functional sense, and the big center-mounted gas cap on the C2 Corvette is certainly Truth in Engineering.

We ran with two Corvettes in the 2006 GTTSR as they were driven by friends of my father/co-driver. These guys could never pass by a gas station. Thirstiest cars I’ve ever been around. Their tanks are bigger than the E-type’s yet they stopped twice as often for gas. The Jaguar is NOT a miser by any stretch but these plastic machines suck down the go-juice like there’s no tomorrow!

Diesel Deductions

Above: Fuel Prices in Trafton, WA on June 1st, 2009.

As I noted back in February and March, the price of Diesel at the pump has been tracking consistently lower than gasoline this year. The past few years (since roughly 2005) when it was higher, in some cases quite a bit higher, seems to me to have been an anomaly. This is from the perspective of somebody who has been buying Diesel for three decades, starting in the autumn of 1982 when I took an old 1980 VW Rabbit Diesel with me to college as a sophomore. I wonder if this means the ‘Diesel is more expensive’ meme on the automotive enthusiasts websites will finally die? We’ll see.

Mind you, I haven’t bought any of the stuff at the pump since March, as I fill up on home-brew when the weather is warm. Nice to see the price staying where it should below gasoline though.

Car Photo of the Day: A sweetly bulging bonnet.

There is something aesthetic to purposeful variations to otherwise clean lines of a machine. The intake scoop of the C-type Jaguar. The twin bonnet ribs of the Mercedes-Benz 300sl (meant to provide clearance for the intake manifold and cam cover.) The big brake cooling ducts of the Ferrari 250P. The tidy little bump pictured above. Their purpose gives them reason for being. Form following function. Vorsprung Durch Technik. Ja?

There is something equally ugly to purposeless doo-dads applied onto a car made to make it appear sporty. The stuck-on ducts and bulges of the Pontiac Trans-Am from the “screaming chicken” era. Big wings on the rear of FWD “rice rockets”. The fake cloth tops on 80s luxury cars. These are out of place affectations. Automotive poseurs. These sorts of insults to our intelligence and aesthetics have appeared on some major-league players as well (Ferrari comes to mind) so I’m not just picking on low-hanging fruit here.