I need to be brief in this post because I could talk for hours about how I modified Mercy to run on veggie oil. My wife Erin jokes that if you want to get me talking, just ask me about how I modified old Mercy. So hopefully I wont take too long and get too crazy with details. I found the kit on http://mercedessource.com/ and I really have to give it to Kent Bergsma for engineering this kit, and putting it all together. I ran across Kent's Single Tank Conversion video on YouTube when I was researching how to do it, and was hooked immediately, here it is.
I ordered the kit right after we bought Mercy and drove her home from Idaho Falls. In the kit I also bought some other necessary parts to tune and get the car running great again. Please look at Kent's channel on YouTube, but I will warn you that you may find yourself there for hours.
Erin's parents Konrad and Diane graciously let me pull the car into their garage so I could have a warm, dry place to install the necessary parts. Let me say as well that I don't consider this a conversion, I consider it a restoration/ modification. The diesel engine was originally designed to run on peanut oil, as designed by Rudolf Diesel. Anyways, I tore into the project with the help of Erin's brother Brian. We built the bracket and mounted the filter canister. Next I added the boost pump at the rear of the car, and then plumbed the whole system to control between "looped" and "return" modes. This allows the engine to push the excess unburned fuel back to the tank, or loop it around the warm engine so as to not waste the heat in the oil. The next step was to install all the filtration systems. I really have to hand it to Kent, he has definitively planned this system to be completely safe for the engine by immense filtration systems. After all the fuel lines were finished the heating system was plumbed into engine coolant, to heat the oil from the hot oil.with warm engine coolant, and also electric heat. The install wen well, but when I tried to start the engine it gave me some major problems. It took me some time to bleed the system, and wait patiently for the glow plugs to heat the veggie to a usable temperature. After a few hours and a number of Lemonhead's, we were running on Veggie Oil! What a feeling!
I got the SVO (straight vegetable oil) bug way back in April of last year. I don't know how exactly it started, but I still remember sitting in my statistics class, looking at mid-eighties Mercedes diesels and being utterly obsessed. I was getting the itch for a project at winter was once again loosening its frigid grip on beautiful Cache Valley, as well as searching for a car that would become my daily driver after I passed the keys to my 2007 Subaru Impreza to what was my fiance, and who is now my lovely wife. In high school I had driven a 1985 280CE every day for nearly two years and loved every nuance, headache of the Mercedes 123 chassis. I also gained an appreciation for the genius of German engineering in these cars, and then I found the Diesel.
Growing up with gasoline, diesel engines were a mystery to me. So when I started investigating a 300D I took a YouTube crash course in diesel automotive theory. I also found the incredible story of a Mercedes 240D with almost 2 million miles on the clock. Check it out here. http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_23-9-2004_pg9_7
In case your wondering, this blog is about a very wonderful automobile that runs on wast vegetable oil. Here you will find the adventures associated with "going off the (energy) grid."
