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Originally Posted by ToddT58
For over a decade I've been running used cooking oil (heated two tank system) as well as some biodiesel and veg oil blends.
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I have been favorable to biodiesel for a long time, but sometimes I get me thinking about advantages of running vegetable oils (either pure or blended with some animal fats) as fuel to avoid the energy expense and the cost of the chemicals involved in the biodiesel brewing.
workaround ideas to discuss among friends: Should we rather use pure plant oils instead of biodiesel?
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Next in line is my '95 F-150, 4.9l six, 5-speed OD Mazda trans and a high 2.xx ratio rear end. I have no idea how many miles are on this truck but I get 15 mpg around town and 19 if I behave on the highway. For contrast, my brother drives it and it gets 15 mpg on the highway. The nut behind the steering wheel is the biggest variable.
My plans for this truck include a wood gasifier and rebuilding the engine for higher compression. The mods needed to optimize running woodgas are the same for straight alcohol... raise the compression and bump the timing. My goal is to have this truck run exclusively on fuels that I can make, namely wood and straight alcohol.
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Woodgas sounds interesting, and it can use virtually any dried agricultural residue, and the leftover ash can be used to reduce the soil acidity in order to enhance the sugar content in some crops, which is useful for ethanol brewing.
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While my brother needed to use my F-150, I bought a "beater" that has turned out to be a keeper: '82 VW Rabbit diesel, 1.6l, 5 speed, naturally aspirated. 145,000 miles but it hasn't been driven much in the past decade.
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It's a die-hard little ride, and can stand decently to some single-tank WVO setup.
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I have an '85 F-350 flatbed with the 6.9 diesel, 4 speed and what must be a 4.xx rear end. No tach but that thing is screaming at 65 mph.
Just recently, I was given a Perkins 4.236 diesel that for the past 30 years was in a late '70s Ford F-100 4x4. It came out of a mid-'60s vintage Massey Ferguson combine. Top end in the pickup wasn't much but it got 26 mpg. The owner swapped the 236 cubic inch/3.9 liter 4 cylinder diesel back to a gas burner 300 six cylinder and gave me everything related to the Perkins... radiator, cross member, bell housing and adapters to run a Ford transmission. I'm toying with putting that diesel in the F-350
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The 6.9 might be more suitable to run on biofuels than the Perkins, since the IDI makes it more resillient to use WVO. But it doesn't mean that the Perkins would be any bad at all.