The People's Car running on The People's Fry Oil (1mb of pics)

[luke]

This weekend I helped a fellow grad student convert a 1986 Volkswagen Golf diesel into a dual-fuel veggie oil burnin' machine. This is kind of techy, but it also involves deep frying, so I figure it will pass in chit-chat.



Above is the car in all its slightly rusty glory. Near the rear end you can see the jugs of used peanut oil from the numerous deep fry parties we have at work.

This project started with a lot of head scratching about how to run the hoses for the kit we had. We settled on taking the combination oil-line/coolant-line triple hose from the oil tank forward under the rear seat and through the floor under the rear seat. In order to squeeze the hose beneath the edge of the seat, we had to apply the sledge hammer to put a divot in the floor. See below:



After we got the divot pounded down, we drilled a hole through the floor for the hoses to get underneath the vehicle. When coolant is circulating through the hoses they get fairly hot, and we figured it would be better to run it under the car rather than through the passenger area and out the firewall. The completed divot and hole, along with the oil tank, are seen below:




We then hooked up the hoses to the veggie oil tank. This tank was fitted with a heat exchanger inside (looks like a heater core from under your dash) that gets plumbed into the engine coolant lines. This heats the veggie oil up and makes it fluid enough to pump up to the engine. The tank is also fitted with an electric fuel guage. To fill the tank you have to pour in to the normal fitting on top, which can get messy.



Once the tube was down under the car, we drilled holes along the seam of the rocker panel to zip tie the tube in place. Hopefully this will keep the tube up out of harm's way, but it does hang rather low under the car. The front end of the tube is run up into the engine compartment near the rear engine mount.



In the engine compartment there are a few different pieces that need to be installed. We put in a Racor filter for the veggie oil, which is the gold colored thing in the next pic. From the filter, a line runs to the solenoid, which is used to select which fuel supply you want to run on, either diesel or veggie. There is no option for mixing the fuels in this system, you're just using one or the other. We have to disconnect the normal diesel line from the diesel filter to the injector pump and plug it into the output of the solenoid. Then a new section of line is put in from the diesel filter to the solenoid. There's a whole other bit of plumbing for the return valve, but I won't get into that here.




To warm the veggie oil in the tank, we need to splice into the engine's coolant system, as I mentioned before. In the picture below, you can see the two clear coolant lines that we ran over to the heater hoses. The heater hoses are cut in half and a barbed tee in put into each hose. The engine's water pump pushes coolant through the first coolant hose, back under the car, into the veggie oil tank, and then the coolant comes back to the engine via the second coolant line. The coolant line is a Teflon tube which can handle the heat, but is a bit of a pain to form into smooth bends without kinking. It requires a heat gun to soften and then form.




After all that, plus wiring up the switch for the solenoid, we fired up the engine. It took a little while for the air to work its way out of the fuel system, and quite a while for coolant to get pushed all the way back to the trunk and up front again, but once the veggie oil in the tank was warm, we flipped the switch and started running on veggie oil. There was no detectable difference in how the car ran once the veggie oil hit it, no stumbles, no change in noise, nothing except a slightly different odor to the exhaust.

Coolant flowing through the heater hose splices:


Coolant flowing through the tank, and veggie oil being pulled up to the engine (via the small diameter tube on the right):


The diesel/veggie oil supply switch on the dash. It's the red and green thing next to the hazard light:


Lastly, here's the reassembled engine compartment. This car was easy to do the swap on because of the huge amount of empty space under the hood. We had no problem putting the filter, extra lines, solenoid, relay and other junk under there.


The kit we used was from a group at www.greasel.com, and was fairly complete except for the barbed tee's used to plumb into the heater hoses. This vw had large diameter heater hoses, so we had to go find 3/4" barbed tees and larger hose clamps to fit them. Other than that it went very smooth. We spent 2 afternoons on this project. I believe the kit was about $400. If he's lucky, all the veggie oil to run this will come from the used fry oil supply of various fast food joints around town for free.

[mike]

so how's it running on WVO now? Is it setup to start on diesel then swap over once it's heated?

[MossMan]

That's frickin' nuts

[sceep]

thats fawkin awesome..

[TripleJ]

Cool. I had heard about doing this, but hadn't seen any details on how it was done. Might put one of these on my truck. There are sure enough fast food places around here to supply me.
Thanks for the write up and pix.
jjj

[ForestCam]

The hemp car's cooler.

http://www.hempcar.org/

[ShawnM]

If you drop a block heater in the fuel tank and pre warm the oil, can you start it without using the diesel?

[Rothbone]

Do you have to process the oil in any way or can you pour in straight from McDs? I have seen a write up on making Biodiesel from vegatable oil. It sounds pretty interesting. http://journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_svo.html

[DevilJeep]

Originally Posted by luke

www.greasel.com

fixed the link

[luke]

Originally Posted by mike

so how's it running on WVO now? Is it setup to start on diesel then swap over once it's heated?

Yep, you start the car on diesel, switch over to veggie oil once the oil is heated up (maybe 5 minutes of running), and when you're getting ready to shut it down you switch back to diesel to allow for a quick start the next time.

[luke]

Originally Posted by Rothbone

Do you have to process the oil in any way or can you pour in straight from McDs? I have seen a write up on making Biodiesel from vegatable oil. It sounds pretty interesting. http://journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_svo.html

This setup is just running filtered straight vegetable oil, no mixing with diesel. It gets a pre-filter through a muslin bag before being poured into the veggie tank, and then gets a final filter in the Racor filter mounted in the engine compartment. Obtaining the oil is going to be my friend's task, I just provided the mechanical know-how and tools.

[Del taco]

good motivation to eat more Temura Shrimp.


is ot me or does someone need to frush that cooling sys.

[Del taco]

does everybody behind him in a traffic jam get hungry?

[luke]

Originally Posted by Del taco

good motivation to eat more Temura Shrimp.


is ot me or does someone need to frush that cooling sys.

The coolant running back to the veggie tank still has air in it. We need to splice in a valve or petcock that we can crack open to purge the air, since those lines are basically the highest point in the system.

[MossMan]

Originally Posted by Del taco

is ot me or does someone need to frush that cooling sys.

What the fuck is a "frush"?

[TEX]

Originally Posted by Del taco

does everybody behind him in a traffic jam get hungry?

Not as quickly as those behind the hemp-mobile

TEX

[SHERPA]

I don't think you're going to get very good flow in those teflon hoses to the
oil tank for preheating..... since all you did was "T" off the existing in/out lines
for the heater core, the path of least resistance will flow the water straight-
thru your installed "T" fitting, with very little flow into the teflon tubes....

You should have installed (2) "L" fittings into only one heater-core line.
so the coolant flows from the heater core, then exits the heater core, and
then flows into your oil-tank, then exits the oil tank and flows back into the
return line back to the water pump...... Kapishe-?

or the other way around.. Oil tank first, then heater core.., then back to
radiator...........

those "T" fittings gotta go..........

--Sherpa

[Frankie_Bones]

Originally Posted by SHERPA

I don't think you're going to get very good flow in those teflon hoses to the
oil tank for preheating..... since all you did was "T" off the existing in/out lines
for the heater core, the path of least resistance will flow the water straight-
thru your installed "T" fitting, with very little flow into the teflon tubes....

You should have installed (2) "L" fittings into only one heater-core line.
so the coolant flows from the heater core, then exits the heater core, and
then flows into your oil-tank, then exits the oil tank and flows back into the
return line back to the water pump...... Kapishe-?

or the other way around.. Oil tank first, then heater core.., then back to
radiator...........

those "T" fittings gotta go..........

--Sherpa

I was thinking you could re route the exhaust but I don't know how warm diesel exhuast gets.

[sceep]

Originally Posted by SHERPA

I don't think you're going to get very good flow in those teflon hoses to the
oil tank for preheating..... since all you did was "T" off the existing in/out lines
for the heater core, the path of least resistance will flow the water straight-
thru your installed "T" fitting, with very little flow into the teflon tubes....

You should have installed (2) "L" fittings into only one heater-core line.
so the coolant flows from the heater core, then exits the heater core, and
then flows into your oil-tank, then exits the oil tank and flows back into the
return line back to the water pump...... Kapishe-?

or the other way around.. Oil tank first, then heater core.., then back to
radiator...........

those "T" fittings gotta go..........

--Sherpa

ditto the sherpa. go from block to tank to heater to block. best route.

[luke]

Originally Posted by SHERPA

I don't think you're going to get very good flow in those teflon hoses to the
oil tank for preheating..... since all you did was "T" off the existing in/out lines
for the heater core, the path of least resistance will flow the water straight-
thru your installed "T" fitting, with very little flow into the teflon tubes....

You should have installed (2) "L" fittings into only one heater-core line.
so the coolant flows from the heater core, then exits the heater core, and
then flows into your oil-tank, then exits the oil tank and flows back into the
return line back to the water pump...... Kapishe-?

or the other way around.. Oil tank first, then heater core.., then back to
radiator...........

those "T" fittings gotta go..........


--Sherpa

I see what you're saying, and it makes sense. The current setup works very well though, so I'm not going to bother changing it just yet.

Actually, if the heater is not turned on (temp slider on the dash set to cold), does coolant even flow through the heater core? I was under the impression that the heater core was shut off from flow when the heater wasn't selected, and this would not allow your method to function. Comments?

[FourBanger]

I don't know where that idea came from. Every car I've seen (started working on them in '91, worked on lots of '80's and newer cars), the heater control only controlled a flapper that allowed air (or didn't) to pass through the heater core. Coolant always flowed through the core.

I remember reading the directions on a bottle of radiator flush stuff. It also said to turn the heater on full hot. Maybe on older cars, the controls actually controlled the flow of coolant.

[luke]

I've never had to pull a heater apart, so I'm probably just talking out of my ass with the shutting off the coolant flow idea.

[ShawnM]

My 4Runner and Corolla both cut the water flow to the heater core.

[TMAN FJ60]

Originally Posted by ShawnM

My 4Runner and Corolla both cut the water flow to the heater core.

same here on an '84 Land Cruiser

[Grim Reaper]

Damn why not do something original?

Coachgeo took his 404 Radio box (a gasoline powered vehicle) converted it to a Deisel. Then made it run on fry oil. Then he drove it from Ohio to Panama city when he moved.

Search it. He had a bunch of posts in the Mercedes section when he did it.