GREASE NOT GAS 2003

My third year of Grease Not Gas was not a particularly good one. Somehow, my focus on not spending money had distracted me from the fact that i had to make a little money as well. My truck wasn’t getting any younger and with my pockets empty, i decided it was time to look for some sort of job that actually paid me something. I was starting to feel like i wasn’t contributing to society a whole lot and my silly little website wasn’t doing much good either. Perhaps Grease Not Gas was a waste of time and other people just weren’t as excited about running their cars on vegetable oil as i was. Back in Portland, i set up a screen printing shop and spent the better half of the year focused on making clothing for people i didn’t know or care much about. I was making pretty good money, but i felt like a robot and an unfulfilled robot at that. A friend told me about this guy Scotty Wittlake, who was interested in getting a truck and converting it after checking out the first version of the

On the fifth grease powered trip across our great and beautiful nation i was joined by the one and only Mr. Eric Lovejoy. This trip was filled with frigid nights unsuccessfully trying to filter sub-zero temperature grease. From Oregon to Montana, Colorado and Illinois we were constantly struggling to heat the grease, allowing it to thin down and pass through the filters. We were using a contraption called a “Farm Stock Heater” which is designed to keep troughs of water from freezing. It’s basically a heating element you plug into a 120 watt electrical source. Running an inverter off the battery allowed us to dip the element down into the grease as it sat in the sock filters. You could tell the filtering process would speed up when the element was in there, but this was actually a bad thing. At the time i though the grease was thinning down and cruising through the pores, but in reality the heat was allowing the pores to stretch out and let all kinds of crap through. The filters were made of polypropelene, which isn’t very resistant to heat. We realized what had happened a little further down the road as our inline fuel filter kept clogging every hundred miles. I had actually had this problem before but it was now that i realized what was going on. Time to find a new filter that could resist a little heat. (Polyethelene)

ON TO 2004