Rain!!

I'd never seen California rain, until this morning. It's a good thing I'm leaving in October - I prefer my mental image of the Bay Area as ALWAYS being sunny. Well OK, it's not so bad, but according to the locals, it can (and sometimes does) rain for months in a row here! NYC is cold, but it has the advantage of many sunny winter days.

Tons of progress made in the last few days. Brian has the clean veggie oil tank fully fabricated and the larger dirty tank is almost finished. Once he adds the ports for filling and sucking oil, we can bring them over the Bay Bridge and put them on the bus! I hope they fit down the hallway - it will be tight, but if my measurements were correct, they should squeeze through with an inch or two to spare.

The rest of the veggie fuel system is coming along quite nicely - once we get the tanks in, we will connect hoses and start testing everything out and collecting grease. Aaron wired up a bank of 3 switches based on a design by Green John. One switch is left for diesel, right for veggie. A second switch is left for dirty-to-clean-tank pump on, right for pump off. The third is for routing the fuel return either into the normal diesel or into the veggie tanks.


We installed these switches into the driver's left panel. I also figured out that there is an easy way to shut off the bus batteries - there is a big breaker switch just to the left of the batteries in the main compartment, which makes it much easier to play it safe!




Aaron wrapped copper tubing around the two fuel filters for the veggie oil. They are marine centrifugal filters that should also separate any water our of the fuel. The copper tubing will be for engine coolant to flow through in order to make sure the oil is nice and runny when it goes through the filter, something that speeds up the whole process and makes the filters more efficient.


Aaron also made a simple mount for the dirty filter (the filter for the dirty grease) and the dirty pump. The dirty filter will contain 30µm filters that need to be changed roughly every 500 miles and they will be accessed from the hallway. I am thinking of building a closet in the hallway, since there will have to be a recessed wall that will separate this filter from where the bed will eventually be. The dirty pump will pump grease through the dirty filter and into the clean tank. We are lookig for a good way to have an automatic shutoff circuit for this pump so that when the filter gets sufficiently clogged and the vacuum pressure gets sufficiently high as a result, the pump will shut off and a light will come on on the driver's dash. If we can't do this circuit right now, we will just put in a pressure gauge that will have to be checked periodically.


Daniel cut holes in the side of the bus for the veggie oil fill ports. They are pretty high since the tanks are sitting on the floor of the bus and the fills are at the top of the tanks. We JUST barely made it under the bottom of the window frame!




Daniel also cut holes on the wood panel on the inside of the bus. We removed the piping for the washer and dryer since I don't ever plan on washing my clothes again. At least not on the bus, that is! ;) The vegetable oil fill hoses will come through these holes and dump into the top of the tanks. Normally you would only fill the dirty tank, but if you have oil you know is very clean (or if you are really desperate to move) you can put oil directly into the clean tank. The bed will be above all of this, so under normal circumstances the only thing you might notice is a little heat coming up from the heated tanks.






I've also started designing the first microscope stations in earnest. This is the initial design. It will go between the refrigerator and and the front door. It will be 6 feet wide and 2-3 feet deep and there should be enough room for two microscopes and 4 students. I am currently planning on making the infrastructure from materials from a company called 80/20. It is like industrial strength tinkertoys! There are two local firms that will help me with the design and make sure that it is structural sounds and can withstand the shears the structure might encounter on the open road.

Finally, we are on for the first demonstration on October 20th in NYC at the Siemens-Columbia Science fair. More information on that soon!