Sixes, Oregon coast

A meeting with some excentric miners. Here they are showing off their newest panning wheel, the gold will end up in the center of this wheel, as it is very heavy. They won't bother looking for more, unless they can find at least 6 flakes in the middle..One of them was heading up to Alaska as that is where he thought you could get the most, although it is more dangerous work up there. He drove a jeep that looked like it was made of gold. Below he is showing the wheel about halfway emerged in a side stream, so that the stream takes away the other debris while this wheel is turning..

The coast was clear and some beautiful arches showed up.

Humbug Mountain is showing it's top, nice hike and great campground next to it, that allowed you to walk through a canyon to a nice beach.

Umpqua, Oregon.

Jacob Huber is our next stop, he has thousands of gallons and is buiding a biodiesel reactor, here is his setup. His tinkering in his shed led to some biodiesel boiling over and catching fire and he had a blackened roof to show the result. But he has learned and is setting up a very clean looking reactor. His place is a ways off the I-5, a river runs through the valley below, nice place Jacob!

Portland, Larry is a neat guy with a dream oil setup. He had a bunch of information from all his experiences and had tinkered a nice system together, with lots of filters, a pump that had no problem reaching our tank. He took a good look at our system and had some great suggestions, like adding a vacuum gage, so you can tell when the filter is getting plugged up. He also helped us put a switch in so we could turn that Vegtherm off. The Vegtherm Mega heats up real fast, and allows us to switch over within a couple of miles from Diesel (in spring weather), so the whole 2800 mile trip required less than half a tank of diesel, not bad huh? We took him out to his favorite mexican food place, and were very grateful for all the info and tips he had. Not to mention his clean oil. He was working on a custom tank that would allow him to drive half the country and back on his own oil. His Duramax would get 17-18 miles to the gallon. He mentioned one bad experience with a person who gave him the bottom of the barrel, and ended up replacing fuel filters every 100 miles, this was a good caution for us. Luckily we only changed filter once the whole trip, and that could have been premature, as some of the air was leaking out of a rear tire, thus giving the feeling of less power.

Start of our first Vegetable Oil Trip, the hope is to do three or four states, and having people share oil on the way, or buy oil from a large retailer.. We're bringing about 65 gallons to get us started. The custom aluminum tank holds 40 gallons, and then as you can see above the tank are tied another 6 cubies in horizontal position with a cardboard over it, to strap it all down.

The two biodiesel collectives in Spokane have now merged and are trying to become an official non-profit.

The website is: http://www.spokanebiodiesel.org/

This is great, more people, more sharing of resources and knowledge. Looking forward to seeing it grow..

Western Washington University to burn waste oil to heat campus:

Truck is going great, it sure helped to have 4 glow plugs replaced. The temp gauge showed 240 degrees yesterday, it is now T'd in between the Vegtherm and the IP. It even got up to scrolling Hi, so it went outside of the reading.

I try to use the vehicle only when I know there has to be errants as well, as I prefer taking the bike to for commuting (it is almost 8 miles each way with hills). On Friday's I telecommute, which is a great way to avoid commuting as well.