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This is the first part of a series on a school bus bound for Boston on its maiden voyage of greasy community education. 
Our goal is to get to Boston with a bus that is converted to run on waste vegetable oil. This was a home conversion completed by Nick Moser, costing around $2500 to complete. Not being grease monkeys growing up, this project has taught us a lot about diesel motors. We had some minor problems trying to get the engine hot enough, so we replaced the thermostat, and now it works fine, getting up to 170 within moments of turning over. The Bus has a functioning wheelchair lift, but most of the seats have been taken out. The lift makes getting oil really easy. All we have to do is take an empty 30 gallon drum, and a heavy grease pump hooked to a 12v lawnmower battery, and suck the fry oil in to the drum. We drag it over to the lift and up she goes. After the grease settles in the 30 gallon tanks for a minimum of 12 hours, we pump it into a beer keg converted to a pressure tank. We pump this up with a bike pump or a air hose until it gets somewhere between 40-60 psi. Then we open a ball valve and the pressure forces the grease through a 3 stage water filter that gets the particulate out of the grease down to 3 microns. Our first destination will be New Orleans, where we will meet with a nonprofit called Termite and Vine which acquired an abandoned house and is fixing it up. This trip is a humanitarian mission with undertones of business and pleasure mixed in, which works great because the theme of the bus is work-live-play. We are going to have the first annual meeting while in Boston. Meanwhile we are going to help Gabe and Anya with the baby they are having very soon by cooking, cleaning, and running interference, so the mom and baby can sleep and recover for the first few weeks. On this trip we will promote our projects and write a few blogs along the way. So check back every couple days to see new blogs about this trip posted.
Last update: March 19, 2009
11:06 pm
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