The Grease Beast and other Beasts…

So, yea, we’ve had some “car trouble.” Nothing we couldn’t handle, though. Well, let me (Amy) start from my first day of work in early October, when the truck wouldn’t start. I awoke early to prepare for my 45 minute commute to a babysitting position I had accepted, and found snow covering the ground everywhere. It was a beautiful sight, but when the truck didn’t start and we discovered there would be too little energy from the solar panel system to support us plugging in the giant diesel, I knew I had to act fast. I quickly called a neighbor, who told me our other neighbors hadn’t left for work yet and were heading our way. Since they had no phone, I proceeded to put on a jacket and I ran. I ran up our driveway, I ran underneath the maple canopy along the road, and then down the long path to their cabin.

Moses Lake

Before slowing our pace in Missoula for three days, we treated ourselves halfway there to a night at a trucker’s motel in a faithful town called Moses Lake. Here, aside from stepping out for a short walk to see the nearby lake reflecting the setting sun, we needed to give some attention to the Truck. Actually, it was the veggie oil system that was out of order. We were continuously blowing out fuses in the pump that we use to pull oil from restaurant bins and then to fill our tank with. Jon went to work as Inspector Gadget, and after blowing about three additional fuses he found some crossed wires! Picking up another fuse, the pump was working again and more oil was filtered into the tank for tomorrow’s drive.

Got Grease?

We were warned a few times that it would be hard to find unclaimed grease throughout California, and gas prices are usually much higher there. So, a couple of weeks before our arrival in San Diego we sent an email thru fillup4free to a person who stated there was a network of grease car owners in the SD area who may have extra WVO to give away for free. After corresponding with Frank, he sent out a mass email to a few other grease car owners and WVO collectors in the area. Then I received a call from Ned who said he could give us enough to fill our tank, so we arranged to meet with him. It was great to see fillup4free work like it did, and just like the couchsurfing network, it will be very fulfilling to give back to the cause once we settle down.

Vinh Binh

Let’s talk truck!!! We devoted chunks of time in Fort Worth searching for a pot of gold, for a sweet waste oil find. No discoveries yet, though we did learn that the chain “Pei Wei Asian Diner” has a secret dungeon where the oil is mysteriously dropped and later extracted by what sounded like a super futuristic machine, possibly the Terminator’s only source of work nowadays. I did say “I’ll be back” to the lady since the menu looked pretty good.

The Beast Needs Grease

Ironocally when we arrived in Athens, our host Abby had been working on this great drawling of Kali and her roomate John was writing a report on her… Anyway, the black beast has been running pretty well. We seemed to be loosing a little coolant somewhere so a rather easy DIY gasket placement in the thermostat housing seemed to do the trick (thanks Kearin for spotting that for us). We have been running on grease from Philadelphia to Charlottesville to Asheville, Athens and about halfway to the meditation center in Jesup, GA. Unfortunately in Asheville, Blue Ridge Bio-Diesel has the waste veggie oil market monopolized, so no luck collecting there, and only a few gallons discovered in Athens. Luckily diesel prices seemed to have dropped to about 2.25 a gallon down here. I think our best luck is going to be in more populated suburban areas and hopefully we can stock up in Florida.

Then There Were Two

Bart, the Ford Focus is no longer with us. Bart was a good man and will be missed. PS – Were not selling the scooter!

Buckets of Grease

Saturday, while making a run to the health food store Amy and I decide to stop into the Thai restaurant in the same shopping center to see what they can offer us in grease. First we went out back to check their grease barrel and all looked good. Out of curiosity we also checked a couple of other barrels from other restaurants in the same center. There was a dumpster from a pretty popular franchise stakehouse, which will remain nameless. Oh man, gross… first off there was some kind of piece of animal carcass sitting right on top and as you open the lid there was globs of gross grille grease and other various animal parts sitting on the screen. I peered into the dumpster and there was a tan foam floating on the surface of the grease. This is exactly the type of grease we have to avoid.

We Struck Gold! (eh, sort-of)

After a day or two of me hitting up a few places around the neighborhood and having no luck, I took Amy out with me to see if she could do some smoothing to get us some fuel. We hit up all Asian restaurant, most of them told us that they have a person that picks up their oil already. We explained that we we’re looking to take just a little to use in our truck and that we would take it for free, whatever they could offer. Still no luck, just confused faces when explaining that our truck runs on their used, dirty kitchen grease. So just as were heading back home, we decide to check out a place that I asked a couple of days before. This time we went out back, there were some folks from the kitchen hanging around. When we inquired about there grease they said “Go right ahead!” So… we’re like “awesome!”

Now again this is our first time collecting and using the filtration system so we had a couple of slight set backs…

Converted!

Just got our truck back from our good friend Pat who helped us out bigtime with installing our greasecar kit. As you can see we added the greasecar on-board filtration pump. Now all we need is some GREASE! See more photos HERE.