Learn me Grease Conversion please

1984 Cummins 3.9 Turbo in my friends food truck. He wants to convert it to fryolator oil because food truck.

Please learn me...

I did it with a 85 300d. Not to hard. Bought a used kit from a truck, made my own tank with a plastic 12 gallon boat tank, the truck tank was way to big. 

My biggest issues were filtering oil in the cold nh winter, and the one that killed me was not being able to get enough free waste oil. 

Buying waste veggie made it not worth it when you consider the time to clean it. 

If you get a centrifuge, it may be different. 

@Irrs where in NH? I am in Somersworth. My buddy is in VT.

WVO and SVO can be tough.  It requires some rather complex heating systems that can (and eventually will) die.  Have you looked into biodiesel?  It's a bit labor intensive and a teeny bit dangerous, but the fuel is completely compatible with mineral diesel.  You won't need to change anything about the engine.  SVO/WVO means preheating the fuel for 30 minutes or so, and having an onboard heater capable of supplying the wattage necessary to maintain the viscosity of the fuel in the coldest temps you expect to drive in.

Biodiesel conversion uses chemistry.  You put a solution of lye (catalyst) and methanol (solvent) in the WVO and agitate it.  This strips off the glycerin leaving simple fat chains which is biodiesel.  The iffy part is that you then need to drain the glycerol off the bottom, distill out the methanol, and find some way of disposing of the glycerol.  Farmers like it.  You can make your own hand cleaner with it.  Coat a dirt or gravel driveway with it.

Expect your first few batches to suck and you'll have to keep some spare fuel filters around.  If you don't get the mix just right, you don't strip all of the glycerin and it clogs the filter or cokes up an injector.  If you don't distill all the methanol out, it burns too fast and you get loss of power and bigger booms too early.

In reply to preach :

Rochester.  I think I  still have a couple of frybird?? High flow valves kicking around somewhere. The person I got the kit from had upgraded from the greasecar units. I used the grease car units on the benz. 

In reply to Curtis73 (Forum Supporter) :

Start on diesel, when warm switched to wvo. Preheat cycle was about 2 minutes when Temps were above 70,10 to 15 mins when 30 or below. I put a blanket on the hood in the winter and kept the car in the garage. The blanket helped keep the engine warm over night. Heated filter and tank with coolant from the engine, and a electric table runner on the tank for 2-4 hours in the winter, on a timer for the am starts. 

Would get 120 to 200 miles per gallon of diesel used in the summer, 50 -70 in winter. Used a hell of a lot of wvo though. The longer the trip, the higher the gpd will be due to the warmup time. 5 min trip, 2 mins on deisel, and a system flush before turning engine off, probably the same as running diesel for the whole trip.  I had a 45 min comute, so lots of wvo. Another tip, park in the sun during the day. Hot wvo, but hot car also. 

Make sure you do the flush before shutting down so the injectors ate not full of wvo when you go to restart. Wvo won't ignite when cold.

In reply to lrrs :

I had thought about going bio, mixed a small batch, not fun, and not cost effective if you are trying to save money. 

If the goal is to save the planet, either option works. 

I put 100K miles on my Ram 2500 on bio I made.  The first processor was made from on old water heater turned upside down. That one would yield about 35gals a batch. The second processor was made out of a 120gal propane tank turned up on end.  I could feed the truck for a month on a batch, about 90gals.

The whole system is up on the shelf right now with diesel at $2.30 around here.  My cost per gal was about .75 to .80 cents.

People will say you can ruin your engine and you probably can do bad things with a bad batch. I was doing some pretty advanced process methods and never had issues.  I would have tried SVO but my driving is mostly short stuff around town and the VP44 pump on my truck was known to not like the thick stuff.

The truck has 357K on it now and is driven daily.

I did it for 100K miles on a 92 Merc. I had it dialed in. I could collect and filter in a suit and not make a mess. 
the oil needs to to be CLEAN, DRY, and HOT before you switch to grease. If not, you'll be buying filters and fuel pumps, or engines far too often. 
if I remember correctly, by fuel costs was something like 7 cents a gallon. I did burn diesel, but a tank of diesel lasted me at least 3,000 miles. Yup. I'd change my oil and fill my  tank at the same intervals. 
my wife did a trip from MI to NY and back and burned less than a gallon of diesel. 
they (wvo, bio) have advantages and drawbacks. Bio requires less upfront cost, but time and money for each batch. Plus chemicals to keep around and replenish. 
Wvo requires more up front  cost to "convert" the vehicle, but then only requires the same filtering required to start the bio process. The n you're done. 

lrrs said:

I did it with a 85 300d. Not to hard. Bought a used kit from a truck, made my own tank with a plastic 12 gallon boat tank, the truck tank was way to big. 

My biggest issues were filtering oil in the cold nh winter, and the one that killed me was not being able to get enough free waste oil. 

Buying waste veggie made it not worth it when you consider the time to clean it. 

If you get a centrifuge, it may be different. 

 

I had a centrifuge. Simply amazing. I could filter oatmeal in the dead of winter. No consumables except electricity. 

Curtis73 (Forum Supporter) said:

WVO and SVO can be tough.  It requires some rather complex heating systems that can (and eventually will) die.  Have you looked into biodiesel?  It's a bit labor intensive and a teeny bit dangerous, but the fuel is completely compatible with mineral diesel.  You won't need to change anything about the engine.  SVO/WVO means preheating the fuel for 30 minutes or so, and having an onboard heater capable of supplying the wattage necessary to maintain the viscosity of the fuel in the coldest temps you expect to drive in.

Biodiesel conversion uses chemistry.  You put a solution of lye (catalyst) and methanol (solvent) in the WVO and agitate it.  This strips off the glycerin leaving simple fat chains which is biodiesel.  The iffy part is that you then need to drain the glycerol off the bottom, distill out the methanol, and find some way of disposing of the glycerol.  Farmers like it.  You can make your own hand cleaner with it.  Coat a dirt or gravel driveway with it.

Expect your first few batches to suck and you'll have to keep some spare fuel filters around.  If you don't get the mix just right, you don't strip all of the glycerin and it clogs the filter or cokes up an injector.  If you don't distill all the methanol out, it burns too fast and you get loss of power and bigger booms too early.

 

Sorry Curtis, you're misinformed. The heating system in the car simply uses the engine's coolant loop. No more failure prone than the heating system on any other vehicle. In the summer my grease was up to temp (165 F) in as about 5 minutes, in the coldest Michigan winter it might have been 15. But no wattage needed, By the time the engine is up to normal operating temp, the oil in the tank was up to 165. Then I'd switch over. I'd switch back to diesel about 1/2 mile from where I was going. If it was summer and I was going to be leaving again in an hour, I wouldn't even bother switching back over to diesel.  
Bio is not as simple as many make it out to be. It's not a simple formula of X gallons of WVO means X lye and X methanol. Each batch is different. From my experience helping a coworker, you could have a batch that looks right on the test strip, then doesn't look right from the passenger seat of the tow truck as you're being dragged back home to drain your tank and start over again. 
Eventually my coworker got it figured out and he had few bad batches, but there is no such thing as a bad batch of filtered WVO. 

The "mods" to the vehicle are basically adding a second fuel tank, lines, filter and a few valves. The coolant system will run back to the tank and wrap around the secondary fuel filter. Some don't do a second filter, some don't heat the tank. I did. It's just a bit more work to set it up (one time) but after that, it's fool-proof. 

To each their own, but you can't ever convince me that blankets on the car in a garage, plumbing coolant loops through fuel tanks, remembering to switch over to diesel, having two completely separate fuel delivery systems, a centrifuge, and a heated filter "fool proof."

I also am well aware of the complexity of making biodiesel.  Hence why I said it's chemistry.  It takes a well-organized system to make sure you're doing the chemistry right.  Every batch is entirely different.

I'm an avid environmentalist and a diesel lover, but the thought of all that complexity kinda kills the biggest reason I love diesels; simplicity.  About 10 years ago I got really deep into it.  Read books about it.  Joined forums for it.  Started shopping for parts for it.  It's the ultimate GRM endeavor. making your own fuel? How cool is that?  And after all the research, I just googled for stations that sell biodiesel.

Great for some, not that great for me.

The truck is not used in the winter. He is watching this thread. Thank you all.

Curtis73 (Forum Supporter) said:

To each their own, but you can't ever convince me that blankets on the car in a garage, plumbing coolant loops through fuel tanks, remembering to switch over to diesel, having two completely separate fuel delivery systems, a centrifuge, and a heated filter "fool proof."

I also am well aware of the complexity of making biodiesel.  Hence why I said it's chemistry.  It takes a well-organized system to make sure you're doing the chemistry right.  Every batch is entirely different.

I'm an avid environmentalist and a diesel lover, but the thought of all that complexity kinda kills the biggest reason I love diesels; simplicity.  About 10 years ago I got really deep into it.  Read books about it.  Joined forums for it.  Started shopping for parts for it.  It's the ultimate GRM endeavor. making your own fuel? How cool is that?  And after all the research, I just googled for stations that sell biodiesel.

Great for some, not that great for me.

 

Did you read any of my many "Living with a Greasecar" threads? I parked my car outside, through Michigan winters, never used a blanket or block heater. That's as simple as simple can get. As far as the plumbing, yeah, you do it once. One weekend spent. Then use it for years, in my case 100K miles before I sold it to a guy that was and probably still is using it to commute from Michigan to Florida. The two fuel systems is just like many trucks that use dual fuel tanks, but with an additional filter and two valves. Again, spend a weekend once to install this stuff in the car, then set it and forget it. Easy-peasy. 
The centrifuge isn't WVO-specific. Some people use house water filters ($$$), some use old blue jeans from Goodwill (interesting) but I used a centrifuge. If you're running bio, you still need to filter it. The 'fuge is the best way because it filters and dewaters in one pass. Really, it's easy. I turned it on, opened the valve, and came back in a few hours to a tank of fuel. Again, no different than bio, except the lack of the experimentation.  The heated filter was a stock fuel filter with a pre-made copper coil around it. I didn't use a heated base because I didn't need it. Again, one weekend and all this stuff that you think is soo terrible is done. Once and done. No test strips, no chemicals, no crap to get rid of. I'd scrape my 'fuge out and either sell it to bear hunters (great bear bait) or combine it with wood shavings to make KILLER starter logs.  

As far as remembering to switch over, well, when you're doing this you NEVER forget because it's just the coolest thing. You can't wait to switch over because now your riding free!  Switching back over? Again, you just adjust. They do make systems that use temp sensors that switch over automatically when the oil is up to temp. I don't know what they do for the purge, I suspect it's a turbo-timer so you shut the car down it switches back and it idles for XX minutes and shuts off.

Now biodiesel, on the other hand, each batch of fuel is a few hours in the garage to filter, measure, mix, measure, filter, re-test, re-measure, re-mix, and on and on.....for EVERY tank of fuel? If, no when you get it wrong, you find out when that bad fuel hits your engine. You coast to the side of the road and call a tow truck. There's a few months worth of fuel savings gone. 

Not knocking bio, different strokes for different folks. It's just funny when someone that hasn't done either pretends they know more than someone that lived it every day for 100,000 miles. Sure, I didn't live bio every day, but I spent enough time helping my coworker get his car right. That experience is why I decided to spend a whole weekend (haha) adding a fuel system to my car. 

Preach: 
Here's something to consider if you're running bio or wvo. The extra lubricity of both fuels well decrease wear on your engine. But, BUT you MUST change your oil more frequently. The grease will make it past your rings (just like diesel does) then will collect in your oil and sludge up. I changed my oil every 3K and never had an issue. When I did my head gasket as either 290K or 310K the cylinder walls and cam lobes still had cross-hatch very visible. I'm not sure, but I think Bio has less of an issue with the sludge because a lot of that is stripped out. But I figured, changing my oil more often is good anyway. And my fuel was about $0.07 - $0.17 a gallon (iirc), so I could afford the oil.

In reply to DrBoost :

I can dig it.  Consider me schooled 

That sounds awesome and close to what I want to do. Did your friend do it? Planning on getting a step van and converting it to veg oil.

In reply to preach :

Did your friend end up converting to veg oil? Sounds like a great idea.

I had a 96 F250 Powerstroke.  I put oil in the fuel tank.  Ran from Scranton, PA to Conneticut with a 28' enclosed trailer to buy a car.  Then drove all the way to Waco from PA with it.

No issues with the fuel, just make sure its been filtered out.  5 micron is good if memory is correct.  As long as you only use in the summer, or where temps stay above 70ish you should be alright with no heater.