Soul Gypsy

Preparing for this installation has been a months long process. Choosing and ordering the materials needed, applying winter grease-burning concepts to my own material vehicle and designing what I believe to be a bomb-proof system. Installing a veg-system has not set process so every step has its own battle: how do I attach this switch, where should I run this line, what is the most efficient way to to heat the fuel.

For those of you who don’t know. Vegetable oil will burn in a diesel engine – but it has to be heated to at least 160degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature in which it is near the viscosity of diesel fuel. So the general practice is to start you car on diesel fuel, wait for it to reach operating temperature and then switch to Veg, when you turn off your car you switch back to diesel to purge the engine. So a veg system involves a way to clean and heat the veggie fuel and a way to switch between diesel and vegetable oil. I went with an entire coolant heated system, some systems use 12volt elements as well. My system consists of (in the general direction fuel flows):

1. One 80 Gallon Tank -this should give me a 1000 mile range

2. Coolant heated fuel pickup “Hotfox”

3. Water seperating “Vormax” filter (coolant heated)

4. Hose in hose fuel lines where I ran an aluminum fuel line through 1 inch coolant hose.

5. 4 switches, three of these I bought and one was stock as the tank switch on my vehicle. See there use in the schematic below.

6. Coolant heated fuel filter

7. Heat Exchanger (coolant heated)

Here is a schematic of the install: Just realized I kinda wrote all the stuff from different sides – oops.

Besides working on the veggie install we have also been building on the inside of the vehicle. Here are some pictures of the system. My friend Jerome has been helping me a lot with this project, he is a very bad ass handyman that has pretty much every skill you can imagine.

Jerome Cutting my Bed-Table set up

The end of a Hose in hose fuel line, the coolant comes out a T

The first switch that chooses between diesel and veg before the lift pump the empty ends will come into play when I splice into the diesel lines

This is a good picture of Hose in Hose set up

Heated fuel filter

Heat Exchanger - I insulated all my coolant and fuel lines for maximum heat retention

Jerome drilling the holes for the final switch, we found a sweet spot right next to the injection pump

More to come, I hope to burning Veggie oil in the next couple days. But today I’m going skiing.