August 31st
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Click on the links above to see our "Wok-umentary" of our three month journey living in a bus as our family of five converts the world's first luxury motor home to run on free, waste vegetable oil, and then drive home, cross country on

The Fat Of America

August 31st, 2006
Location: Seattle
Day 50

Back Up

-         Today it’s actually raining for the first time in 6 weeks. It’s gray and icky, just like you would expect it to be in Seattle, except we wouldn’t know…Poor Stevie, yesterday he said for the first time that he liked a place and wanted to go back, Madison beach, and I said, “we can just come back tomorrow…”and now this. Not exactly beach weather.

-         We slept at Commodore Park again last night. It’s so strange to feel like you are coming home to a parking lot under a train bridge…Steve decided last night that it was a good idea to dump a little of our gray water in the parking lot. Of course, he wasn’t talking to me about that, since I told him not to do that when I am around. Sure enough, a guy comes around and says, “Man, are you dumping your sewage here?” People care! Steve told him, “no of course not! I would never do that. You don’t shit where you live…” The guy says, “Yeah, I hear you man!” Steve explains, “I’m having a purge problem”…Where does he get this stuff?

-         So now we can’t come back here because there might be noodle all over the parking lot…

-         Maybe won’t actually have to…we may actually run on VO today!
Steve just went out to pick up a few gallons of virgin vegetable oil at a Cash & Carry so we have clean oil to start the system with. We are sitting in the van right now waiting for him.

-         Lilli is sitting in the back singing songs. Halle’s toy guitar was left in the van and the kids have been intensely making music ever since they discovered it in the back. She is sitting there singing “This is the song about punishment…” plucking away on two of the otherwise broken strings…of course, it doesn’t take long and somehow she is hitting Julia over the head with the back of the guitar…lovely children I have…

-         This morning we went to Julia’s Restaurant. Chris said it’s good and much better than IHOP, which was absolutely true! As we were walking in, someone gave us a gift certificate for $10 off, so all of our delicious food came to only $22! We got another certificate on the way out so we will pass that one on to Chris and his family…what goes around comes around…

 
I bought a little Virgin oil.  It turned out to be partially hydrogenated, which was the only thing available.  It had a terrible gelling and was a factor for making life miserable the first day trying to get the system to run.  In RI, you can not get this stuff so easily.  All you have is the regular, pure soy oil, that flows cleanly.  This stuff left little bubbles of lippids in the fuel filter.  GROSS! and it was not even used!  
Here is a picture of Jeff working on the control panel that I made.  I caught a bit of shit from Frybrid for wanting to make my custom control panel. After all, they had done hundreds of installs with out anything special for the panel.   But after a little while, Chris became "into it" and seemed to get why I thought it was worth putting the extra effort into making it look good.  He ended up almost insisting I do it perfectly, and helped file down the edges of the aluminum control panel with his metal working equipment in the back of the shop.