Quote:
Originally Posted by PBH
If it's a Honda the black mark is not important. Just do it.
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True enough! The fact that their car starts every time they turn the key, day in, day out is enough to drive me crazy... that was especially true when I was driving my Regret-a-Jetta
Quote:
Originally Posted by dewolf
Ok, please excuse my ignorance, but why can't you just filter the vegie oil and drop it straight in the original tank and drive away? I know little about diesel engines, but I'm planning on ML diesel shortly.
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There is a a lot of evidence that injecting vegetable oil into a cold engine will do damage over time. Even if the oil is heated, if it gets on COLD cylinder walls it causes coking on the piston ring landings and eventually stuck rings. It'll work, but it's frowned upon.
Some people do what's called "single tank" conversions. They use heated filters, injection line heaters and special injectors. They'll work in some warmer climates, but I don't know a whole lot about them because I couldn't get away with one in my climate. There's an outfit in California that does really sketchy one-tank systems: Lovecraft. They are the MotorMeister of the veggie conversion world. That's the problem... lots of peopel have cobbled-together systems that they think work GREAT because the car runs. A diesel will run on turpentine and horse pi$$, but it's not good for it.
Some people also run a 50/50 diesel/veggie mix, or even 25/75 gasoline/veggie. That seems to work great in warmer climates, and Mercedes seem to work well with blends like that. VWs, not so much.
In my case, I have a parallel fuel system for vegetable oil, and can just switch fuels once the car is up to temperature.
I switch back to diesel before turning the car off, and for 2 minutes I'm in a "Purge" cycle where the vegetable oil is being flushed out with diesel, going back into my veggie tank. Once the "purge" is done, I'm I can switch the car off. It's got 100% diesel in the system so it will start fine.
After some minor "tweaks", I should have that down to 1 minute in the winter, 30 seconds in the summer.