So it's been a long while since I updated here, but this is where the bus stands at the moment...
Last fall when it was still warm out, I got thirty or so friends to come over and paint things on it, and it turned out looking like this:
Some good, some bad, all messy. We'll be hitting it again before we set out this summer. Most of the talented artists stuck to the roof:
Shortly after that, I brought the bus to the diesel shop of a local technical school who offered to help with the conversion. They've been absolutely incredible, and their connections have made getting parts a lot cheaper and easier than it would have been otherwise. Perhaps the best part is that they roped in some of the other trades to help. The welding shop made an incredible tank, the HVAC shop made the heat exchanger, and the drafting kids made exact drawings of it all:
On the other side of the bus, across from the day tank, we have our mini refinery. I just realized I don't have any decent or recent pictures of it, but it looks a bit like this:
It's rigged up so that we can either suck veggie oil into the drum, or pour it in from cubbies. It will drain through cheesecloth and a coarse metal screen, into the bulk tank. From there we can pump it through filters, into the day tank.
So everything is falling into place, and in a few weeks I should be able to post the full working setup. Until then, I'll be posting the little nuances to the blog at
juanway.org.