The origin of Vegetapaul

... thanks to my brother.

For some time I've pondered the idea of running a car on used vegetable oil. This blog will monitor my process of learning and configuring and running my car on the aforementioned substance.

You'll find a lot of information on the subject scattered throughout the web, but I recommend you do your careful research before slipping in. The idea originates with the creator of the diesel engine (and only the diesel engine). Rudolf Diesel designed the diesel engine and used as one of his test fuels peanut oil. Long story short, there is a process that allows you to run your diesel engine with some tweaking on any type of vegetable oil.

There are several benefits to using WVO (Waste Vegetable Oil) or SVO (Straight... you get the idea). It is a lot better for the environment to burn VO (I won't go through this again) than Diesel or gasoline. Besides that it's cheaper. How much? Well restaurants have to pay to have their WVO removed... unless of course someone takes it off their hands for free. (Enter joe public with his overalls). So we've got a source of oil (well theoretically, I just have to arrange with a local Oriental food place!), but now we need a car (I have this).

The Car in question is a 1980 Mercedes 300D. There are a number of choices for conversion. 1979-85 diesels are great beasts as far as engine life and quality. You must be a tinkerer to work out the ups and downs cheaply, but the car is a workhorse (although slow as a mule). So after getting a screaming deal on the car and solving its problems, (and finding more that I didn't know about when I bought it) we were ready to convert.

To run a car on VO certain preparations and adjustments need to be done to your car to make it run smoothly on our new fuel. As you've noticed when you add a little olive oil to your frying pan, VO is noticeably thicker than say gasoline or diesel. That is until its been in the frying pan for some amount of time. Heat then is the key (yes you can do biodiesel, but for me, with a little Vegetapaul junior running around soon I don't want those chemicals readily available). So how do you get your oil to that temperature? Stay tuned.