I just put up a page with links to several books, videos, ebooks and other media on vegcars, biofuels etc. You can find the page here.

For convenience, I’ll post it here as well.

Early this month I passed the 4-year anniversary of buying my veg oil fueled Mercedes 300D. As many 300D vegcar owners have experienced, the car required a considerable amount of repair work. These repairs included front-end work, replacing the air conditioning system, fixing the odometer and a window mechanism and an axle. No work has been required on the engine itself. These cars’ engines are build to run for a long, long time.

I have now logged approximately 40,000 miles on veg oil. I am really pleased with the performance of the car and of the fuel. I have never been 100% happy with vegetable oil as a fuel as a long-term solution to our energy needs. I have been reading a lot lately about our world-wide food/agriculture situation which strengthens these concerns. I am hopeful that algae, electricity and yes, perhaps even hydrogen, will offer a better solution.

This post is from a Vegcar.net reader…

I am looking for a company that is interested in supplying WVO/SVO quality refined used vegetable oil to local market for use a alternative diesel fuel (WVO/SVO conversion users).  We have access to quality products and can delver to your business if you are interested in storing and dispensing.  We can source oil and provide marketing services to drive business to your shop.  If this is of interest to you , please contact us at uco@pacaltenergy.com

For logistical reasons we need to be able to deliver several thousand gallons at  time, otherwise transport costs will drive up cost/price above what market will support.  If you have tank and are intersted, look us up, we would be happy to discuss different options as to how we could put this together.

Cheers,

David

After today’s bankrupcy filing, the United States of America will own more than 60% of GM. Following is a letter from Michael Moore to President Obama (and the Country) on what we should do with our new company.

Goodbye, GM – by Michael Moore
June 1, 2009

I write this on the morning of the end of the once-mighty General Motors. By high noon, the President of the United States will have made it official: General Motors, as we know it, has been totaled.

As I sit here in GM’s birthplace, Flint, Michigan, I am surrounded by friends and family who are filled with anxiety about what will happen to them and to the town. Forty percent of the homes and businesses in the city have been abandoned. Imagine what it would be like if you lived in a city where almost every other house is empty. What would be your state of mind?

It is with sad irony that the company which invented “planned obsolescence” — the decision to build cars that would fall apart after a few years so that the customer would then have to buy a new one — has now made itself obsolete. It refused to build automobiles that the public wanted, cars that got great gas mileage, were as safe as they could be, and were exceedingly comfortable to drive. Oh — and that wouldn’t start falling apart after two years. GM stubbornly fought environmental and safety regulations. Its executives arrogantly ignored the “inferior” Japanese and German cars, cars which would become the gold standard for automobile buyers. And it was hell-bent on punishing its unionized workforce, lopping off thousands of workers for no good reason other than to “improve” the short-term bottom line of the corporation. Beginning in the 1980s, when GM was posting record profits, it moved countless jobs to Mexico and elsewhere, thus destroying the lives of tens of thousands of hard-working Americans. The glaring stupidity of this policy was that, when they eliminated the income of so many middle class families, who did they think was going to be able to afford to buy their cars? History will record this blunder in the same way it now writes about the French building the Maginot Line or how the Romans cluelessly poisoned their own water system with lethal lead in its pipes.

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In my experience, this is sad but true. There is a core of vegcar (and other alternative fueled vehicle) owners who are willing to pay a little more to help reduce their carbon footprint. Putting green (energy) ahead of green (backs), if you will. Most people, however, are motivated by price. This is why I believe that we are only going to see significant change in energy consumption in this country, when one of the following happens:

• Gasoline is back above $4 per gallon
• Alternative fuels become cheaper than gas/diesel at the pump
• The air is no longer breathable

Diesels, which are high-mileage rivals to hybrids, generated interest with VW’s announcement that it would sell a diesel Golf with real-world highway figures in excess of 50 miles a gallon, and with Mercedes’s plan to consider frugal 4-cylinder diesels in larger luxury cars sold in America.

For the past 3 years, I have been buying filtered WVO from Sphere Energy, a San Luis Obispo company. I contacted them last week and they said that business is very slow. They said that oil is not worth enough to cover filtering costs, so they are selling it all to a big biodiesel company. I also came across a blog post at Arctic Vegwerks that an Alaska WVO retailer has also suspended retail sales.

I’m going to contact Sphere again. There has to be a price at which it is feasible for them to filter oil. It might be a high price but I for one would be willing to pay a bit more for WVO than the current price of diesel at the pump. I don’t think I am alone in this, either.

I bought my 1984 300D almost 4 years ago. I bought the car with 198,000 miles on the odometer. A few months later, the odometer stopped working at around 204,000 miles. It worked intermittently before stopping completely.

Last week I had the odometer repaired. The mechanic gave me a tip that I want to share with everyone. He said that I should never hit the reset button on the trip odometer, when the car is moving. I had done this many times, especially when the odemeter worked some of the time. He said that when you hold the reset button in, it can strip the plastic gears.

Josh Tickell, the author of the book, “From the Fryer to the Fuel Tank”, has just released the documentary film “Fuel”. For many of us, Josh’s book was one of the first sources of information available on how to run a car on waste vegetable oil. I haven’t seen it yet but look forward to checking it out.

Check out the trailer…

This site has a very good and detailed, step-by-step process for diagnosing glow plug problems.