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.

Ah, The Beat Farmers

Stumbled upon this video today via a link on a news site in my RSS feed (love that Internet whimsy)… The Beat Farmers were one of my favorite bands in the 80s and early 90s. I deeply regret never seeing them live before the death of their key member Country Dick Montana (here on drums) in mid-performance at the Longhorn in Whistler.

Two of their albums “Tales of the New West” and “Van Go” are usually in heavy rotation on my “chuck’s favorites” iTunes playlist. Good times.

Here are two Country Dick Classics for you “Happy Boy” (the only Rock & Roll song to feature a Kazoo & Gargle solo) and “Big Ugly Wheels”

(Bad copy of the original music video here.)

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!

A milestone reached: A MegaChuck of output!

Above: A peek behind the scenes...

Back in September of 2005, right after I came back from the Colorado Grand, I switched from building all my webpages by hand to running WordPress. Prior to that I had written all the HTML code one character at a time in Rich Siegel’s wonderful BBEdit and dropped them on my server (a shockingly underpowered machine!) located at digital.forest’s datacenter. It was honestly a huge pain in the ass, and I rarely updated the site because of this. Updates usually only happened in the midst of some important event, such as driving from NYC to LA with a bunch of other old cars, or a wonderful road trip with Nicholas as we brought the Jaguar home for the first time. I’d been using the “MoveableType” content management system (aka “blogging platform”) at work for our support website, so already had an idea of what I wanted. WP looked to be the one to use, so I set it up on one of the web severs at the office and started putting in content. Along the way I’ve picked up a nice group of folks to chat with… several hundred of you actually. Some knew me before I started, quite a few have found this place since. A lot of you have hung around and really participated. Thanks!

I noted today that I’ve reached something of a milestone with this post: the 1,024th one since I started using WP to publish my photos, thoughts, confessions, news, and occasional maniacal rants. One thousand and twenty four. That’s a magic number for us geeks at it is the nearest we get to counting to one thousand, though it only takes us twelve numbers to get there. I figured I’d celebrate the milestone by sharing a few thoughts I’ve had about what I do here. Just as I said from the outset, I’m not looking to be a well-known pundit, or a vaunted member of the “blogosphere” … I just want to develop and present good stuff that rattles around in my head and eyes. In random order, here are some thoughts:

  • Re-running old rally stories. The idea here is to repost some of my old (pre-blog, so 1998-2005) vintage rally stories, but this time with the ability to flesh out the tale a bit more. Often these were written in a summary style, late at night after a hard day’s driving, followed by dinner (with drinks!), lots of photo editing and uploading from dodgy hotel Internet connections, and written while my rally partner was snoring in the other bed. I’d re-write them and post them in a daily order.
  • Interviews with other “car guys.” I’d love to develop a series along this line of thought: Talk to people who self-identify as “car guys” (no matter their gender) and find the common threads as well as the differences. Get their stories, histories, etc. The origins of their love for the automobile, the cars that got away, etc. I already know so many people I could talk to… literally around the world.
  • Some more of the same. The tried and true: Rally & Road Trip stories in Real Time. Car Photo of the Day. Engine pR0n.
  • Some Whimsy in the Mix A bit of story telling. A sprinkle of time lapse photography (I think I can get uber-HD time lapse stuff from my new DSLR!) More antique computer stuff if I can find the time.
  • A new WP theme.That is, a change in the layout of the site. The content will remain, but the look will change. I always meant to move off the default “WP Classic” theme, as it is… dull. I never got around to it. I actually have another site where I’ve played with WP themes (don’t bother looking for that site… it is very anonymous and has nothing to do with me. It is just a place where I practice writing for writing’s sake) I think I’ve got a look worked out and if I can find the time I’ll implement it here. If you are some sort of Luddite and actually LIKE the way this site looks currently, let me know. 😉
  • Some behind the scenes stuff. This is mostly server-related. Most of my photos are still hosted and served from my shockingly underpowered machine (seriously, it is a 266MHz G3!) while the WP site runs from a d.f FreeBSD shared hosting box, and the database is running on yet another d.f shared hosting server. I plan to collapse all those back down to a single machine… this time only mildly underpowered. Having the db and the http on the same box will let me do a few whizzy back-end things. No change for you, except maybe it will be a tad faster.

Feel free to comment and let me know what you think.

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.