Due to my close surveillance of the local Craigslists I happened upon an ad for free used vegetable fryer oil. The small restaurant owner had 120 gallons of oil that was supposed to be collected by another individual. For whatever reason the previous used oil collector failed in his mission and the oil had accumulated.

Having stockpiled a nice collection of VW 1.6 diesel cars as well as other diesels the opportunity for a source of fuel was well worth it. Our new tractor was also diesel, and I had bought a LUV diesel pickup last month as a tranny donor for my Isuzu diesel powered Mazda B2200.

I figured worst case scenario I can burn the oil in a used oil burner in the shop. If that was the only way to use the oil it would still be worth collecting, so I rigged up a barrel with an improvised funnel to drop off and prepared to retrieve some oil.

While I am not setup to process the oil currently it was a great opportunity I didn’t want to pass up. The owner of the restaurant stated he accumulates about 20-30 gallons a month. While not enough to become independent of oil, it will be a nice source of fuel for the farm.

I will be working on adding SVO capability to my diesel Ford 861 tractor. It will be nice having almost free fuel while using the 861 this summer. My current plan is to build a side tank for the 861 using coolant to bring the cleaned and filtered oil up to temperature before switching from diesel fuel to vegetable oil.

I will also need to get my shop up and going so I can drop a 1.6 VW diesel in an extended cab Mazda B2200. We have chosen the Mazda B2200 as the smallest truck we can take family road trips in comfortably, my VW Rabbit truck was just to small for a family. My 86 B2000 is not an extended cab, so we are currently using a gas extended cab B2200 as our small gopher truck.

I brought the oil home in the former oil collectors barrels, but had to return them when I removed the oil. I filtered the oil through a screen and have it stored in 55 gallon drums. I will work on getting filters and the tools needed to prepare this oil for use as a fuel. Another project, but deemed worthy of making room for.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Changes to the Website

I will be adding another list to the home page. The Experiment list. These will be current questions I am attempting to answer on my small farm. I am sure others have wondered about many of these questions, and some are related mostly to the way I intend to farm. I will be trying to answer them. My current list is:

Does washing eggs have an Effect on hatch rate?

How many feet of ground can the PVC Chicken Tractor keep cleared?

Breeding the spotted eggs of the Welsummer chicken into our flock.

Constructing a working Living Fence.

 

I will also be changing the name of the Chicken Page to Chicken & Poultry. While the main focus will be on chickens I have always kept other poultry from guineas, turkeys, ducks, quail, pigeons and geese.

Books added to the free book page:

Ten Acres Enough
Dairy farming
Progressive Farming