Conversion of Merc. 307 van to run on vegetable oil

  Vegetable oil fuel tank being built. The internal pipe-work can heat solid palm oil for burning in the engine. Vegetable oil has to be heated to about 80 degrees C to attain similar viscosities to everyday road diesel. Once this temp has been achieved the fuel tanks can be switched over from normal diesel to vegetable oil.

  After testing the vehicle with this tank, we found that heating the fuel evaporated water dissolved in the fuel, which then caused a rust problem in the top of the tank. Stainless steel would have been better than the mild steel that was used, or I suppose, we could heat the fuel before hand to drive the water off, but this would be time consuming and waste fuel.

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  This hatch was welded to the top of the tank and is now accessed through the floor inside the van near the side door. It was designed to enable solid oil or grease to be shoveled into the tank. Tests done have shown a problem filtering solid fuel to 5 micron in that second hand oil clogs up the elements very quickly. We have found that it is more economic to use liquid waste oil and settle it in an oil drum with a conical bottom. The clear, useful oil, can be drained off the top whilst the murky oil and debris sinks to the bottom and can be drained through another tap located at the bottom of the cone and used for making bio-diesel. We are also planning to build a centrifugal filter so that the debris in solid oil can be separated mechanically without using up expensive filter cartridges ....... watch this page!

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  There are a number of different ways to heat the vegetable oil before use in the engine. It can be pre-heated in the fuel tank shown above or heated with electrical heaters or heat exchangers like the one shown here. An easier way is to use the 'hose within a hose' system where you run micro-bore copper piping through coolant hose. We have tried various heat exchanger methods and they all work well, using hot water from the vehicle's heating circuit (as opposed to the radiator circuit). 

  The photo opposite shows some of the valves used in switching tanks. After testing the vehicle we moved some of the valves from the valve mounting. The main switch over valve was re-located right above the injector pump to minimize the amount of fuel in the pipe-work. The key with designing circuits is to get the 'run down' distance as low as possible, i.e. the amount of diesel needed to prime the pump for starting the engine the next day. This is why we advise use of a separate filter for the oil, otherwise the whole filter has to be emptied before turning of the engine. A suggested circuit can be found below:

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  Goat industries is able to supply conversion kits to people wanting to use vegetable oil to run their vehicles on. At present there is no standard kit and we are relying on feed back from people visiting this site and talking on discussion groups such as the following: 

http://www.egroups.com/subscribe/Biodiesel

  To help people convert their vehicle we can supply the valves and fittings for circuits tailor made for their particular vehicles. A lot of cars don't have lift pumps and so the circuit above can be simplified. Please Email us below for more info. or advise.