Diary of a Mad Scientist

posted 24 April 2004 06:59 AM
School of Hard Knocks And To-Do Lists

After the equipment class, I launched myself into full-on battle against my to-do list. The list is so huge it fills a looseleaf binder. Arggh. Jeff’s doing a heavy carpentry job (we generally work together) and my arm injury blew out completely after the equipment class, so I haven’t been working as I can’t quite handle anything heavier than minor electrical work at the moment. It’s depressing being out of practice with carpentry, and depressing being injured. I instead tackled the plant problems and my self-organizing, one-armed, while I wait for the return of light-duty electrical jobs which stress my injury a little less.

I used my enforced underemployment to attack the ‘plant’ for several days in a row and made some boring but important progress. No co-op this time, no volunteer coordinating, just several days straight of grimy, boring labor by myself, which means I got a lot done- but have very little to show for it that is interesting.

I’m leaving for the Southwest in two weeks to teach some classes and tie up loose ends from when I first got sick a few years ago. I’m coming back a month later, hopefully working, then off again in august for a biodiesel class tour extravaganza. In between, I’ll be moving out of my house, dealing with jobs, working on vehicles, dealing with fundraising/equipment finding for the August tour and trying to knock a few biodiesel projects off my to-do list, including a waste oil burner I haven’t yet built, building the larger-scale reactor at the site, picking up some welding skill for working thinner metal which I’m currently awful at, and stuff like that. I’m hoping to do a website after I get back from the southwest- so for the past couple of weeks I’ve been trying to write up material for it which is a painful process for me to complete. I feel pretty oppressed by the to-do list.

But to start a bunch of those interesting projects I’ve still got an Infrastructure monster at the Oakland Biodiesel Brigade to contend with. I put up a ‘lab table’ and shelves for labware- inching closer to being able to actually do controlled experiments at the shop instead of just production- built and put up a whiteboard (the better to manage the day’s to-do list). Cleaned up and degreased even more stuff- it’s amazing how much polymerized oil I’ve scrubbed off of things in the past couple of months. I’m making headway against the grease and dirt. Built a waste water holding tank. Plumbed and wired a few more utility pumps for material handling. Put up a dedicated shelf to the utility pump and of course had to replumb the pump to make it fit. It’s amazing how much time this project can eat up, all on boring mundane tasks. I built a 24 foot high countercurrent wash column (want to experiment with gravity-only countercurrent before going on to a series of tanks or a series of more reasonable-length pipes if it works), then ran into problems attaching the column to the building because of all the obstacles (my full barrel collection) that were in the way.

At the Machine Shop, and also likewise at Tinkers Workshop in Berkeley, we’ve all joked about getting yellow ‘police line’ tape and making a ‘no-fly zone’ around parts of the building, or around equipment or workbenches, where piling up of crap would be forbidden. Somebody already got to the biodiesel shop wall with a forklift full of crap first, so there’s an immovable Pile along the shop wall and now it’s In My Way and needs to be dealt with.

I degreased some more oily plumbing fittings. Degreased some more of the containers I store said greasy plumbing in. Degreased some more old pumps and other equipment from last year. Degreased my grease tools yet again. Degreased the cords the equipment ran off of. Went through the glycerol collection (I have 150 gallons waiting to distill) and pumped off all kinds of useful biodiesel that’s been seeping up out of the biodiesel. Started a new wash on that stuff- easy wash, since the soap has been settling out of it for months. Stayed up all night at the shop last night, and consolidated all the glycerol and oil barrels that were in the way of installing my 24 foot countercurrent wash column. Tried to spend a few hours a night writing up equipment articles for my biodiesel guidebook, which is like pulling teeth since I’m terrible at focused writing. I missed a couple of my own deadlines for the articles, and I’ve been on bizarre schedules, working at the OBB shop till 10 pm and then pulling a few hours writing. Tom and I go on ‘work dates’- he telecommutes and works vampirically odd hours as well- and we sit in a cafe with our computers and write till they kick us out at 2 am. This is my current idea of a date, which I suppose is better than if moving oil drums at the OBB shop was counted as a date.

The Machine Shop went through a massive email flame war with the Investor as a result of the Machinists’ meeting last month (basically the Investor acted immature and insulted everyone over email after some criticism of his management style). It’s disturbing to watch even though it’s not my business, disturbing in light of some of the rifts within the online biodiesel community and people’s tendency to flame and go nuts online. I stayed out of it, but keep thinking of the Machinists’ problems in light of coop issues in general- they’ve got the same crap to go through- communication, and a job that’s overwhelmingly large because we’re trying to do business-sized shop work on a volunteer basis

The Machine Shop is a little like School of Hard Knocks, mechanical engineering department. I’m enjoying being around those people and everything they know, and picking up a little of it by osmosis.

I sat in on a meeting in the shop last weekend about designing a one-wheeled vehicle to try for the one-wheeled vehicle land speed record (current record for a monowheel is 57 mph). Jake’s trying to build an EV version of his existing onewheel vehicle. A few days later I happened to mention to our ex-NASA engineer shopmate that we should schedule a CAD tutorial on the new shop computer sometime. He launched right into it- I’d opened a fascinating can of worms. The conversation started on a level I could sort of follow- drafting and rendering, basic stuff I hadn’t thought about since high school (Solidworks is a pretty fascinating looking tool, since I can’t draw to save my life). Then, from the depths of the shop appeared machinists, programmers, and a computer animation professional with an advanced degree in computer graphics theory (ie some branch of math if I understand correctly). I watched the conversation veer off into High Geek places I’d never been- into computer talk, production talk, and on to CAM and machining, then back to the real world issues of our CNC and things that people wanted to make on it and how to design them. I’m getting a bit of a ‘tip of the iceberg’ sense of skills they use every day, and I’m becoming a big drooling groupie of these people and their skills. We once had a meeting at the shop to discuss some interesting electrical issues with a planned generator someone was looking at buying and some offgrid equipment- it involved weird stuff around three phase power, offgrid applications, and how to hack the electronics of a particular type of inverter not designed to do this- and the meeting ran till 2 am, with none of us even noticing the time, we were so embroiled in a big puddle of brain cells and electrical concepts. You could just about hear the skulls stretching and the brain cells popping like overloaded circuit breakers as everyone tried to wrap their minds around the problems we were trying to solve. It’s a School of Hard Knocks I’m overjoyed to be a part of, and am still trying to figure out how to make biodiesel fit in to the general knowledge-sharing going on there without expecting everyone to put in the same kinds of stupidly boring hours as I just did last week. Tough puzzle, since the degreasing and shelf-hanging and barrel-moving is a much less satisfying activity than what they’re doing with the machine shop- some of them put in insanely long hours at the shop or at their projects- but at the end of the day they’ve got some art or some vehicles or some equipment to show for their efforts, and at the end of the day, I’ve just got some gallons of fuel that’s going to just get burned.

Mark

Equipment Class, Santa Cruz, APril 10 and 11

Phew, what a week.

About a week ago I started the hellish descent into Class Preparation. This was for the Biodiesel Equipment Intensive workshop I scheduled for Easter Weekend.

This equipment class was the first “equipment build” I’ve done for the general public. I was worried about how well the equipment info would come across by itself. I always include an equipment discussion/show-and-tell as part of all the classes I do, but that comes after several hours of chemistry. I did another equipment discussion in San Gregorio in December but most of those folks had already attended another homebrew class at the same site.

I was uncertain about how the weekend seminar for the general public was going to work- who would attend? Would they have enough experience with homebrewing for the equipment-only class to make sense?

Somehow I thought we’d build only one of each item (reactor, wash tank, methanol recovery equipment, mistwashing rig, plastic bubblewash aerator, testing rig, oil pumps).

I must have been on crack when I imagined that we’d only build one of everything- as soon as I sent out a preliminary class announcement, I was deluged by interested people who wanted to participate and wanted to build their own gear at the class. It was very exciting to see all this serious interest in homebrewing. I spent about two weeks talking nonstop to various people who had to figure out which of the options would work for them. Thank God I don’t have a cell phone.

The other prep was insane. I had a new article to write about the reactor design, and a big chunk of every day to deal with the other class logistics. I camped out at Tom’s for several days, sleeping weird hours, running home for an hour or two at a time, running all the pre-class errands, ordering oil pumps at the auto parts store and returning the not-quite right ones, trying to stay on top of the article writing and the class organizing work at the shop. Somewhere during all this time the Machine Shop Collective exploded into a huge argument with the Investor over co-op issues, which is a whole ’nother story that’s quite ironic in light of the last blog I wrote on the issues of volunteer coordinating. I stayed out of it as best I could and tried not to think about biodiesel co-ops either.

Last Monday I started the parts shopping and the planning. It was INSANE! We had 6 or 7 homebrew systems to build, and about $1500 to spend. This was going to involve multiple trips to the stores as no one store was likely to have enough of the weirder plumbing items in stock. Jeff ran to one of the Harbor Freight stores for me and picked them clean of ball valves and pumps. I eventually drove to Sonoma County and started heading south from there, stopping at all my preferred hardware stores and buying everything they had in stock, cleaning out the other Harbor Freight store, keeping a massive chart of what I needed, wondering if I had calculated enough money to pay for it all and otherwise driving myself and the cashiers a little batty. Id’ show up at the cash register with a 5 gallon bucket full of varied tiny plumbing items, dump it on the counter, and they’d have to sort and figure it all out. I got really sick of the question “so what IS it that you’re plumbing?” At 9 pm on Friday night I still didn’t quite have everything. Tom and I woke up at 3 am that night to do the final loading-up of everything onto my truck, and I made him inventory all the plumbing at this helllish hour. friggin slave driver.

We took over the front yard of the hippie house that hosted the workshop- they have a nice big covered shed that already has hosted a small biodiesel coop and an SVO filtering station. About 12 or 15 people showed, most of them coming from very far out of town. About three unrelated carloads of people from Southern California drove the 6 hours to come. Most of the people hadn’t homebrewed before, but they did their research meticulously and none of my worries about the info making sense to newbies were justified. There was a small forest of water heaters ready to convert to biodiesel reactors.

Jess Burge, a larger-scale homebrewer in that area, was there contributing his experience, and my chemist friend Kalib whom I’d met at the Iowa State University classes, was there to share industry perspective. I did lecture for the first half day, and after lunch, we busted out the water heaters and launched into the build. By the end of that day, they were nearly done with the reactors, other than electrical wiring and adding whatever the stores were out of stock on. Jeff was fantastic at assisting everyone, running the last hardware store errands, and managed to rebuild his own reactor during the weekend.

The more ‘hippie’ workshop attendees stuck around at the house for the night, and Dave Shaw pulled out a projector and showed a couple of biodiesel films, Fat of the Land (1994), and a biodiesel documentary he made for a film class.

We covered the entire syllabus during the weekend- methanol recovery, washing, commercial techniques discussion, heating, heat exchangers, heat integration, solar discussion, babington and oil burner discussion, material compatibility, pump types, methoxide mixers, etc. People built wash tanks and got to do the ‘climb inside the greasy barrel and thread plumbing together’ act that always gets a good visual. I tried to stress the drawbacks of the water heater reactors as well as their advantages, and to make it clear as often as possible that different equipment is appropriate to varied situations, that in biodiesel homebrewing there’s no ‘one size fits all’.

I got home and been asleep for about two days straight or at least it feels that way. Real life starts again tomorrow.

posted 06 April 2004 03:32 AM also from the infopop forum blogs thread
Disclaimer: while I hate it when people lie online because it’s anonymous and “they can get away with it”, I gotta do the standard disclaimer “details were slightly changed to protect the guilty”. It’s as accurate as I can make it and still keep some people anonymous.

Cults of Grease and Heavy Machinery

The Machine Collective are another group whom the Investor supports, and they were a sort of model for his choosing to start the Oakland Biodiesel Brigade. The are a loose group with nice equipment and organizational growing pains, and the difference between us and them is that more of them are very skilled in their subject (plus there’s been probably 100 years of people developing standard shop safety and teaching it in high schools, compared to biodiesel’s 5 years of homebrew infosharing. Shop skill is obvious to a larger group of people than biodiesel shop safety is for instance)

The Machinists bought a bunch of auction machine shop equipment a while back, and started a coop to share, maintain, and, frankly, to worship these machines. The equipment would make some of you so insanely jealous that I won’t even describe most of what we have available- for the use of our hobbies and passions (I sure as hell don’t have time for hobbies though. Tell me what’s music again?). Anyway, let’s just mention that a CNC mill tutorial is coming up at the shop and I’m super excited)

The machinists have about 8 or 10 people in the collective, whose skills range from machine shop pros, to former professional welders, to metal artists, to ex-engineers who only use their engineering kung-fu for evil (building robots and battlebots for competition and fun), to a retired NASA engineer who knows the ‘why’ behind everything you might care to ask, to people with more motivation and less or no machine shop experience who want to learn in a non-school, non-work environment. And there’s Tom and me, the lowly junior occasional borrowers of the MIG welder, who merely pass by the lathe with awe on our way to the microwave and do not touch the precious monster.

There’s the Machines with a capital M, and then there’s the droolworthy metalshop, (brand new plasma cutter, big Miller MIG, older Lincoln MIG, and my friend, the little ultra portable fluxcore wirefeed that I can take to the roof if I needed to attach something metal there. Not to mention cutoff saws, bandsaws, drill presses, a torch no one uses since it’s much more fun to cut metal ‘lace doilies’ with the new plasma cutter instead of firing up the torch. Huge taps and dies, both right and lefthand thread, that were found for pennies at the machine auctions, a 4 x 8 x 3” thick steel welding table, various industrial and electronics related “obtainium”, and a lack of a few frustrating common tools. And that’s just the commonly owned group stuff. Which I have no time to learn to use cause I’m in the back alley cleaning out greasy buckets half the night, dammit.

But communism sure looks fun from where I stand (in my own personal grease pit at the back of the property…).

Me and Tom are their Machinists’ biodiesel coop neighbors, and we are the least weldingly skilled people at the site. The other, nonresident OBB members (tom and I both have personal shop space) don’t really use the shop and therefore have even less weldingness to them, so they don’t get to go to the Machine Meeting nor hang with the Machine Maintenance cult..

Anyway, Tom and I been discussing on and off for days how our OBB situation parallels the Machinists and how it’s unique. Yesterday the Machinists had a meeting/barbeque (there’s that magic word again) and we were at it by default as their co-tenants. Oops, I should point out that as masters of “free stuff at any cost” , the Machinists had to spend the first 30 minutes of their meeting grinding down and re-welding and re-assembling the free barbeque grill, before we could have a cookout and meeting, but… Maybe my greasy bucket cleaning routine doesn’t look so inefficient after all.

It was interesting watching some of the same group dynamics come up for the Machinists as I see within biodiesel coops. I keep watching all this stuff come up within biodiesel groups that I think is common to all big biodiesel groups, and I keep assuming it only happens within biodiesel.

. But the machinists- with their ultra-skilled engineer volunteers- they’re the opposite of us in terms of resources and skills, and scale of money involved, and potentially rewarding nature of their work - and yet they’ve got some of the same dynamics and questions coming up about how to organize their group time so that tasks get done and no one gets hurt and everyone’s properly trained and everyone remains contented.

Participation. Training. Bringing everyone up to speed on safety. Getting everyone in the group “on the same page” as far as the shortterm, medium, and longterm development plan for the site. Finding money to pay for equipment work. Compensating people who are taking on more than others can. Not taking advantage of those who ‘seem’ to have more availability due to a lack of day job or excess of helpfullness. How to compensate those who correct the emergencies. How not to turn what is supposed to be a nice hobby into a repressive cult of machine maintenance (greasy bucket cleaning session by the back door, anyone? How about some WVO-collections pump disassembly?)

Oh, and, don’t try to work this out on paper first. Meetings aren’t fun and meetings about theoretical situtions are a useless way to start a hands-on project. The Machinists and we all started in on the work first, and now that the meeting’s full of questions around ‘how do you compensate, train, etc?’ there is actually some experience to deduce the answers from.

Things that you take for granted in a job environment, you really can’t expect in a volunteer group. Including training, skills, participation, compensation. Phew.

And I feel like there’s some fine line that we can dance along, between running it all with overambition and chaos, and running it like a job when you don’ t want to operate as either. I don’t want the four-person Team Canola to look like a jobsite. I want Team Canola to make lots of fuel and still keep it looking like a hobby, to be rewarding without everyone having to become a professional biodiesel plant owner. I don’ t want the machine maintenance to take over our lives there in order to make it work out.

And I think the Machinists have the same thing going on. No one wants to be janitor, but you need teamwork for the janitor’s job to be absorbed by the entire team efficiently enough for the janitor’s job to eliminate itself. Team Canola’s a small enough group that this issue isn’t a problem. Let’s see if it stays that way through Season Two of Team Canola operating, let’s see it stay fun and rewarding.

The Machinists and the OBB are big enough to resemble a workplace and I’m afraid that’s what a lot of coops are ending up looking like.. If you don’t have the time for full workplace-style participation, then the workplace will fail, as happened with the Berkeley Biodiesel Coop. But if you can make it run as something other than a workplace, such as by scaling down to a less-ambitious level, then… ?

Well, we spent a few hours and a couple of grilled chickens brainstorming over having the same issues within our two groups, including unique stuff like our general complaints about the Investor (absent for the meeting!) and about things like, er, um, skills, training, participation, compensation, erm hmmm. Though no one specifically brought it up at the meeting, seeing the obstacles within both their and our ambitious projects, as the issue of “at what point do you have to run a volunteer effort like a workplace and where do you take something workplace-sized if you can’t run it that way?” was the big eyeopener that I came away from this with.

I still think that as-yet undiscovered equipment and process will move us along to where it will get easier to have an ambitious coop without having to run it like a workplace. I’m not talking about novel catalysts or centrifuge technology. I’m thinking we still haven’t tried everything, and we in the biodiesel coop world on the west coast sometimes cling to some preconceived notion of what it should look like based on the fact that the Berkeley Coop did it this way.

I still think there’s room for cells and coops and informal nonbusiness biodiesel producers to create a substantial amount of fuel and meet some others; needs- for instance, our Investor was getting a big chunk of free fuel per month, almost $900 value at commercial Oasis fuel prices, entirely as my own volunteer output. While this was unsustainable of course, someday we’ll get past the technical hurdles and will have a 200 gallon per day, repeatable, open-source design of a plant dialed in, and me and tom and the Machinists hope to have some kind of role in this open source design. And I do think that this equipment will prove useful to people like the Investor’s operation, or other construction companies, or other heavy users who can partner with cells or coops. That’s the part that’s got me fascinated and plugging away at the process- surely there’s something about this coop structure thing that we haven’t discovered yet?

also from the infopop blogs thread…
posted 03 April 2004 02:41 AM

I was laying in bed after work the other night, dog tired. I was so dead doggone tired that I had trouble even forming coherent sentences when I got home (this is that illness thing). I was all ready to pass out and aim for 12 hours of sleep… and then Mr Wonderful (who is going to be so absolutely creeped out about getting that name) from the OBB co-op calls, to talk co-op. So suddenly I’m wide awake and having to remember English well enough to articulate just how frustrated I am over some co-op behavior or another, and to try and strategise about how to deal with our skilled volunteer problem. Additionally, the behavior of our ‘investor/landlord’ was what really set this off, but I had just hit some sort of critical mass whereby I suddenly don’t want to go forward with building this thing any further. Between the investor’s needs, and the more pressing and serious problem - that we have all these underskilled volunteers and that coordinating them and trying to get them trained, is more work than doing the entire job by yourself- I think that coop bit off more than it could chew, mostly in not looking realistically at the labor involved in building the plant they wanted. And boy is that not any sort of new experience in the wide world of biodiesel coops.

I can see my 12 hours of sleep going out the window- after this ‘co-op frustrations’ conversation, I know I’ll be up for hours thinking about the stupid little plant project. Jeff comes in, overhears the conversation, and starts laughing. He’s heard this before, in the Berkeley Biodiesel Coop- the ‘people can’t just expect to waltz in with no skills, volunteer whenever they feel like it, and expect that they can be helpful’ discussion. Jeff’s reaction about all the unskilled flakes at the time was this “*^*% them, let them pull themselves up by their own bootstraps” sort of reaction. I felt a little more charitable towards people at that point.

I know I’ve had the ‘what to do about the amount of work involved in a coop” conversation with several other co-op ‘overachievers’. Jennifer Radtke and I became very good friends after going through it at the BBC. The BBC eventually stopped trying to make fuel, and Jennifer started a distribution business that is MOST CERTAINLY not a co-op. I was having that same exact discussion with her about a year ago and Jeff was standing there saying ‘let them flounder’ back then. I keep saying, no, I want to see this co-op theory work. Really. Surely there’s something we haven’t tried yet.

I thought at one point about starting a Disgruntled DepotMasters listserve just to get the conversations we’re all having, over onto one place. Depot Master is what the SVO coop calls the people in charge of managing their distribution site or something like that. Their depot master complains about nonvolunteers just as much as we do. Perhaps it’s just because the organizing model for a lot of these groups was exported from the Berkeley Coop by people who thought our organizing model was attractive, I think. Anyway, the Oakaland group has it’s own set of problems that are rather unique…

Among other things, we are expected to eventually (the eventually is open-ended) provide 300 gallons per month of fuel to the investor (and that’s of course in addition to whatever we want to make for ourselves). We are no-where near that at the moment as a group.

I spent all fall making that amount of fuel in my spare time for the investor all by myself in a tiny 85 gallon reactor that wasn’t really finished and was terribly inefficient, while building other equipment at the same time, trying to get basic infrastructure work (ie electrical and plumbing and containment) to be finished (it’s still not finished), collecting oil, and unfortunately, coordinating a crew of enthusiastic but non-skilled volunteers. And the fuel production was getting royally in the way of the plant building process. Note to self: pilot plant should not be located in the same 8’ by 20’ shop as where your ‘real’ plant is being built.

The reason why I made such an idiotic martyr out of myself was because I was also trading rent on another space (my wood shop) owned by the investor, and couldn’t stop thinking delusional thoughts about how I couldn’t afford the woodshop if I had to pay money rent for it. And that I couldn’t afford to live in my house, if I didn’t have the shop to keep my copious tools in. Bad. Of course I was so busy with the coop and with my rent trade that I wasn’t actually doing anything productive in the woodshop…

One day I woke up and realized that I’d actually missed a few days of paid electrical work during that time as a direct result of problems at the ‘coop plant’, that this work was worth quite a lot of money as lost wages- and that the time I was spending there making fuel for my shop rent trade, could have been much better compensated if I had just hustled more of this well-paid electrical work for myself instead. DUH! She smacks forehead.

I had gotten pretty much blinded by the internal chorus of ‘I couldn’t afford this, I couldn’t afford this’, and somehow wasn’t paying attention to the big picture beyond the next barrel of fuel- that the project, the rent trade and the coop organizing, had sneakily taken over all my time (it should again be noted that I’ve been unemployed for about a year due to illness, which is in part where these weird circumstances come from, I’m not usually quite that stupid about time management)

So back to the coop, which is supposed to inherit my dumb fuel-for-rent-trade situation as per the investor’s grand plan. In return for this 300 gallons of free fuel, the ‘investor’ is supposedly paying for the equipment and providing free rent. We’ve got some pressure to get it done so that the free rent stops being a problem for him. We are trying to build a pretty big plant by homebrewer standards- it’s not like some crappy 55 gallon plastic conical. We’re aiming for compatible materials- all stainless steel, for commercial techniques, and for 275 gallon batches. We already have a generator to power the thing, which is pretty nice after worrying about the costs of electricity for years, and we have enough robot-building enthusiasts and computer wiz electronics nerds in our circle of friends, and access to great scrap medical research industry equipment, to actually automate the thing someday so that parts of the process are automatic. Or so goes the theory.

Trouble is, the labor that goes into building a biodiesel coop on our usual volunteer basis doesn’t normally enter into the equation for these coops. And the reality is that the labor of starting a large-scale biodiesel co-op - all the time put into training, into becoming a team, into figuring out how the schedules and the connections are going to work- can really dwarf the tiny amount of money that the equipment parts cost if you’ve gotten them from the scrapyards like we do.

The Bay Area has the best industrial scrap you can imagine, and the biotech industry/university laboratory wastefulness being responsible, along with the nearby wine industry and other food processing sources. The Midwest is probably similar minus the nifty automation equipment. I can sit here and say that we’re going to do all this stuff above, and the reality is that it’ll probably only cost about $2,000 to $4,000 and be made of proper ‘compatible materials’- because the medical industry, the food processing industries, and the research industrial complex is so busy throwing compatible materials away for us to find/buy this ridiculously cheap from various sources. I could be wrong about the cost of the automation part- the cost of solenoid valves will bankrupt you and I don’ t know what they cost on the salvage market.

But, will we ever get there- with all the labor that this massive project involves, without becoming a business and somehow figuring out how to pay ourselves?

Last year about this time, I did a calculation on how much time it takes a homebrewer to make and bubblewash a batch of fuel, and what did the equipment cost to do it this way. It added up to 3 hours of attended labor (timers, gravity, etc did the rest of the job while you aren’t looking), mostly in the form of 15 minutes here or there on your own time. This calculation didn’t include “oil getting” since that varies so much from location to location. From my experience with Team Canola I’d say that you can achieve these same numbers up to about a 100 gallon reactor, assuming it’s in your own backyard and you spend those occasional 15 minutes draining or filling or cleaning up here or there while you’re going about your home life. In short, it’s not a difficult task to work around if you’re modest in your fuel needs and the work doesn’t require traveling to a central shop location like we do.

I also have made a lot of simple reactors in about 2 hours of assembly work, and about 2 hours of shopping for parts. A wash tank (see www.veggieavenger.com/media) takes another half hour to build, at least if you’re not socializing and running for the camera while your friend crawls inside the tank to fasten the fittings.

These look like great numbers. It should be even better if more people work on the stuff in a democratic coop setting right?

Wrong!

Kumar and I talk a lot about how the homebrew setup just doesn’t upscale to a commercial setup. I think I just discovered the point at which it stops being applicable.

To be continued…