GREASE NOT GAS 2002

The second official year of GNG consisted of cross country trips numbers 3 and 4. The first was spent with three friends, Scott, Matt & Brooke. Before even crossing the state line, Bonesaw’s starter suddenly went out in Hermiston, Oregon (luckily it was during their famous watermelon season). Lesson 1 of 2002: carry some spare parts, like a starter, jumper cables and lots of tools. In this case we didn’t have a spare starter, but luckily the local Napa store delivered one out to the truck stop we were stuck at. Once i got the new starter in, we had to charge up the batteries (diesels usually have two) using jumper cables and some random high school kid’s car. During this process the cable connected to Bonesaw’s positive terminal leaned over and grounded itself out on the frame of the truck. A shower of sparks and a bit of fire ensued. Shortly thereafter, we had the fire out and the truck back on the road. Good times.

After that, we had to motor across the country to get to our friends, Jon and Laura’s wedding. We didn’t have a whole lot of time to look for grease, so only about 30% of our drive was travelled on vegetable oil. In the back of the truck we carried a handrail for skateboarding breaks at rest stops and in random parking lots. We got pretty creative with it, and even used it out the back door of the camper.

GREASE 102: LESSONS LEARNED IN 2002

Proper jump starting is key. During a major electrical breakdown in 2002 i learned the correct way to jump start a vehicle. This knowledge would come in handy countless times over the next few years. The key is to not blow your battery up in your face. Any charging battery produces a certain amount of Hydrogen gas, which is highly explosive, and can seep out of your battery since it’s much lighter then air. When jumping off some good-samaritans car at a rest stop in the middle of nowhere because you drove through the night and forgot your lights were on since the sun had come up before you went to take a nap, start with the positive terminal on their car, while the engine is running, much like this sentence. Then, hook up the other side of the positive (red) cable up to your vehicle. Nothing’s going to happen yet, everything is safe. A good trick when you’re doing all this is to clip the alligator mouths of the black cables to the insulation (outer sheath) of the red cable, safety first. Next, hook the black negative (ground) cable up to the strangers car. The very last connection you’re going to make is going to close the circuit and if everything else is hooked up right it’s going to spark. Which is a sign that everything is right, however, you don’t want this spark to ignite any possible Hydrogen gases oozing out of your battery, so make the last connection to any other piece of metal on your vehicle. If you take a look at the ground cable on your battery, you’ll see it probably goes about a foot and a half to a spot on your frame where it is bolted down. This is a great place to connect to, unless it’s near any belts or moving parts. Another popular spot is the mounting bracket for your alternator. Again, make sure the cable isn’t going to get in the way of any belts or moving parts. Again, this last connection should spark, so don’t freak out, and you’ll probably hear the other persons car drop in RPM’s, all good signs. Electrons from their alternator are rushing into your battery and charging that lazy guy up. To be safe, give it a good five or even ten minutes and you should have some descent power to crank the motor over. If it still doesn’t want to crank, you’ve got a bad connection somewhere or your starter is toast. One last note: make sure the two cars bumpers, or any other metal parts, aren’t touching or you’ll share a ground, which is bad.

Nothing beats good clean vegetable oil. When you’re on the road and you pull into some random town, it can be frustrating to drive around looking for grease. You’ll find plenty of dirty grease that’s just simply not worth filtering since your filters will clog almost immediately. Look for Asian cuisine, Panda this, or Teriyaki that is usually a safe bet, but you never know, sometimes Italian can be good, or very seldom even a bar, especially if it’s strictly vegan fare. One thing i’ve learned the hard way- when you are cruising the alleys for grease, be sure you’re burning vegetable oil. In other words don’t wait till you’ve run out of grease and now you have to drive around on diesel. In this instance you run the risk of wasting money as well as time, plus it’s bad karma. Just keep a quarter tank of veggie at all times and you’ll be much happier. Plus try going to www.maps.google.com and typing “Asian Cuisine” and the name of the town you’re in. You can even try calling ahead so they’ll be expecting you.

The diesel fuel system is essentially a loop.
Diesel engines recycle any fuel that doesn’t get
sprayed into the motor. Most diesel engines have
a lift pump, which pulls the fuel out of the tank
and then push it up towards the motor, and also
an injection pump, which sprays the fuel into the
engine. Not all the fuel that’s in the injection
pump gets sprayed in. Some of it gets pushed
back to the fuel tank that it started from, in a
smaller fuel line called a “return line.”

This animation highlights the system in Soy George,
our four cylinder RV, which does not include a lift
pump. The IP (injection pump) does all the work of
bring the fuel up to the motor, as well as spraying it through the injectors.

When it comes to filter size, bigger is always better. I switched from the small cleanable Racor filter to a much, much larger one called an FH-1000. The element is like an accordion wrapped to make a cylinder shape, so the surface area is much larger then the steel disk i had been using. I bumped from a couple hundred miles between clogging up to a couple thousand, sometimes even ten.

ON TO 2003