Diary of a Mad Scientist

Oddly enough, as I’m about to leave my stint at the world’s most unique offgrid Machine Shop, I’ve finally enrolled in machinist school. I"m attending what I think of as “Concrete Community College". The architect who designed the school must have thought he was building a shrine to the god called ‘one part Portland Cement, three parts sand’. It’s a really urban campus on the south side of Chinatown. They seem to have an enormous budget for pigeon impaling devices so that the concrete stays fresh and birdpoop-free.

While I was a tenant at the Shop, I was too ill to get involved in the actual Machine Shop club at our shop, and I’ve been a bit afraid to learn safety practices from people who learned them third-hand from someone who was at one point an actual working machinist. Whatever energy I’ve had the past couple of years has been going to learning to weld, and to my silly dedication to those damn tanks at the biodiesel project.

At this point though machine technology seems like a good set of skills to pick up, considering I think of myself primarily as an ‘inventor’. Mills and other machine tools fall into that category of ‘crap’ that’s so huge that it’s sometimes sold off quite cheaply by hobbyists in cities like this one. The Machine Shop has outfitted itself primarily due to it’s willingness to take on Big Crap that others smartly get rid of due to the constraints of rental space in the city.

Concrete Community College machine technology program is kicking my butt- it’s something like 16 contact hours a week, evenings. I have no spare time now. I also stupidly enrolled in the welding class and three others. I havent’ really been in college before, and I"m having a blast remembering elementary school arithmatic. No, really, it’s been fun. I felt a little silly in my ‘math for the trades’ math lab on the first day- I used to be quite a geek as a kid, and my math skills have atrophied 110% due to disuse.

So here I am in remedial math. It was extremely funny realizing I’d forgotten how to divide by fractions- I just pull out a calculator for those arithmatic problems that aren’t in the “16ths” of my carpentry profession. Then I looked over at the kid across the lab, and he was literally counting on his fingers with a confused look on his face. And he was actually college age so ‘disuse’ wasn’t his excuse. Damn!

I’m actually learning a lot about how badly people ‘don’t learn’ and it’s been a great immersion course in teaching styles- things I never noticed when I was there in high school or trade school in my early 20’s, before I"d tried teaching people myself.

The welding class is particularly funny- I"ve been in a couple of different schools for auto mechanic classes before, and thought I had a good idea of what to expect here in a trades program. But no, I’ve finally found something that attracts stupid kids even more than working on cars does. Daytime community college auto mechanic classes are usually full of unruly 18-year-old boys who aren’t interested in academics (diesel school’s a bit better since it attracts people who know what they want to learn- they tend to be older, already work as mechanics, and tend to be focused). But even for the 18-year-olds, auto mechanics is something that they’re likely to have done before, and it takes a certain amount of thinking. Welding doesn’t.

So Concrete Community College is full of these kids who just CAN’T FOLLOW DIRECTIONS worth a damn. I started over a week late because of the East Coast trip at the end of August, so I"m still in catch-up mode in my classes. With me in ‘catch-up mode’ in my welding class are some of the young kids who started on time but just don’t get it. The other day we had ‘remedial cutting torch’ demo- all the kids who had flunked the cutting torch written safety test after practicing it in August, were getting the whole load of info all over again.

We had a long line of kids (sorry, ‘guys’- they were all doofy guys- not ‘kids’, which implies that the girls were flunking Cutting Torch along with the guys), standing around the cutting torch table. Each person, um, I mean guy, would get to the front of the line and pick up the torch. And I’d watch from the end of the line as a great big dial tone would go off in his head. Nothing there. If you’d like to make a call, please hang up and dial again. And this stagefright comes right after watching the teacher lecture and demonstrate it (for the second or third time). So each guy would go up to the front of the Remedial Cutting Torch line, do everythign wrong, get it all corrected a few times, do it wrong, get it corrected again. Then the guy in line behind him would go up to the front of the line, pick up the torch and stare at it like it was somethign alien he’d never seen before. And proceed to do it wrong. Many times. Then the next guy would get up and pick up the torch wrong and not know what any of the controls did, again. again.

Hooray, I just jumped ship at the Machine Shop. Or, at least, I’m in the final throes of moving out.

I’m moving down the street to another sculpture studio, where non-artistically-inclined me and the equally artistically-challenged boyfriend are going to share a nice, warm, indoor fabrication space for our ‘wanna-be engineer’ projects.

After the really crappy facilities at the Machine Shop, the idea of being someplace where I can leave tools out without fear of them getting rained on seems like an unimaginable luxury- especially relevant with the coming of the rains next month. The thought of welding indoors, without standing in big wet puddles while gazillions of amps of real, live, renewably generated power flow through my workpiece is really pleasant. I’m moving up in the tinker world. Maybe I’ll even make something pretty this year with my newfound metalworking skills.

Actually, there’s kind of a nerd exodus going on at the Machine Shop. All the smart kids have left in droves in the last few months. Kind of a ‘rats fleeing a sinking ship’ sort of feeling.

I was kind of maintaining radio silence about something I’ve been dealing with a lot in the past year- we’ve been dealing with an increasingly abusive and dysfunctional landlord/shop manager guy (the artist known in this blog as The Investor), to the point where the shop’s been sometimes difficult to use. Now a lot of us have taken flight for better spaces.

A lot of the geeks at the shop have been sort of chased off by The Investor. There’s been a lot of opportunity to argue- we have an in-house email list which is sort of his personal soapbox. This encourages people (particularly The Investor) to yell at each other way too much. Traffic on that list is immense, and the signal-to-noise ratio is appallingly low. We’re all supposed to be on the list because it’s where logistics discussions happen- whether the power is out and who lost the forklift key and whether some crackhead whose set up camp outside in the alley needs to be chased off.

For all my participation on biodiesel discussion forums, I happen to detest ‘armchair politics’ and other theoretical blabber, and I’m not a member of the Burning Man communities that most of them belong to, nor am I interested in ‘art’ in any shape or form, so it’s been sheer torture having some of the chat garbage flooding my inbox for two years. Unfortunately the Investor has refused to allow us to have a non-chat list for just the shop essentials (ie where we’d discuss whether the power is on and what crap needs to be moved where). I’ll be sooo happy to unsubscribe in about three weeks.

The new space uses it’s email list to discuss the bills and tenants’ comings and goings, rather than the goings-on, real or imagined.

The problems at the Machine Shop were manyfold- our warehouse is just way too small for the number of artists (hence the repeated ‘welding in the rain’ problem). We lack an all-important ‘Thou Shalt Store No Crap’ clause, which leads to packrat behavior. Packrat behavior times 25 packrats is kind of a problem. No one is really in a position to ***** about the Crap Storage Problem because we’re all almost equally guilty. I say ‘almost all’ because The Investor is far more deeply ‘over the top’ about his packrat tendencies than any of us- guy is occupying about 6 times the amount of public space as any of us do, piled with rusting useless junk that he hasn’t touched in a few years.

Most projects in ’shared space’ at the Shop begin with an hour or two of running the forklift to move other people’s crap (at times, mostly The Investor’s crap) out of the way. This phenomenon is another reason I"m such a fan of welding in the alley, that one with the big puddles in the wintertime- it’s usually empty. If you want space you’re cleared to remain clear, you have to stick around and vigilantly bark at people who try to Pile Crap onto it. That’s been referred to as ‘pissing your territory’, and it’s sometimes a really dysfunctional dog-eat-dog world in there when it comes to space use. The Exodus of the Nerds was some sort of response to this level of functionality, I think.

It’s been said by former residents that the Shop is not a place for people who want to just come in a few times a month and make art- it only functions if you’re a constant presence, a full-timer. And the constant self-inflicted electrical issues are an even bigger problem. They’re moving towards fixing those, slowly, but in the meantime, it’s like living for years in an ongoing generator-fueled electrical renovation with ‘electrical curiosities’ that give little reward and cause a lot of hassle.

A couple of years ago I was a full-timer at the shop. The last few months I’ve been up in the Foothills, still paying rent at the Shop, and of course it’s been quite frustrating to come down expecting to do some work and find that some incredibly vast Burning Man project has taken up ALL of the public space, five months before Burning Man. And that’s the best-case scenario- at least we supposedly exist for the purpose of doing Art, which is a much more noble purpose than Storing Crap, which is what actually happens in the public space most of the time.

At one point this winter, after pissing everybody off with some longwinded list arguments about Burning Man and Art, and signing our collective names, without permission, to a petition about an issue that not everyone agreed with, the Investor abruptly tried to back out of managing the joint (he doesnt’ own the real estate, just manages the art space). He offered it to us on some conditions- that we become a nonprofit entity and collectively manage it together, rather than one or two interested parties taking on his former role as a manager.

We had a big meeting without him, discussed the liabilities and benefits, and found almost nothing beneficial about the arrangement. The place is just far too small, and we’d still retain him and his 6 spaces full of crap. I think after that meeting all the core group of Most Involved Nerds all lost heart and started finding other spaces to join. A few people, people who’d been there since the very beginning and had worked closely with the man, left with a bang- various flavors of nasty, angry Exit Speech. I’m avoiding it pretty well so far which is quite unlike me- I dont’ think their ‘what I hate about The Investor’ speeches have done anything to change the guy, and he already knows everything I think of him- I dont’ mince words and mine came in person, not via email. Too bad, it’s a nice setup in some ways. Next stop, Xian Studios…

Back when Biofuel Oasis was just a mote in it’s mothers’ eyes, and they were still trying to figure out how to afford such a non-money-making business, Hope and Jennifer briefly considered the ‘mobile tanker’ fuel distribution model.

Apparently there was a used tanker for sale somewhere and it seemed easier to buy a tanker, rent a cheap parking spot, and sell from the tanker’s Weights and Measures certified pump, than it was to find a location suitable for a stationary set of tanks/going through the rigamarole of setting up a new certified W&M pump, etc.

I found that idea hilarious and teased them about running Fruitvale’s first Biodiesel Taco Truck. I assume everyone knows what I mean by Taco Truck (recently some Canadian on one of the biodiesel lists was quite mystified by our use of the term ‘Roach Coach’ to describe a mobile dining establishment)

The Biodiesel Taco Truck idea’s out there, and I think a few people have implemented it in various cities- buy a small tanker, or a trailer with a tank on it, plop it into various parking spots, and dispense fuel to co-op members or whatever, and, voila, less red tape at least for ’startup’.

Some of the headaches with biodiesel distribution come from our being tarred with the ‘flammable/toxic petroleum gas station’ brush- Hope and Jennifer had to spend a year in red tape, proving to their fire marshals that biodiesel didn’t require a petroleum gas station’s regulatory requirements fulfilled, and that it was OK to store commercial biodiesel in polyethylene tanks in a light industrial warehouse (I think in hindsight they think the poly tanks were a mistake).

Luckily they were able to run the ‘carboy exchange program’ the whole time, selling 5-gallon containers of fuel with strict instructions to the customers that they were not allowed to fuel up (and spill) directly outside the station. Kimber and Eric at Biofuel Station in Laytonville had to go through their own rural red tape, causing Mendocino County to create a new zoning category for sale of commercial biodiesel, called something like ‘fuel sales, non-toxic, non-flammable’ or something like that- it’s difficult to convince regulators that the stuff is a fuel and at the same time, nonflammable in storage conditions. Kimber and Eric also started their business delivering off a transfer tank and then a minitanker truck, before they had their red tape in place for the stationary fueling station.

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The Taco Truck idea lives on. I think a few people in the biodiesel small distribution world have bought a tanker and done distribution off of one without owning a fuel depot facility.

Piedmont Biofuels bought an old fuel oil tanker, inspired by Kimber’s example, and spent a couple of years taking it across the state to Charlotte to pick up 1500 gallons of fuel at a time for their B100-hungry community near Raleigh. They brought the fuel back to the Triangle area and delivered to customers right from the truck, without going through a stationary Weights and Measures certified pump morass (one appeal of tankers is that they come with certified pumps and double-walled containment already).

It’s probably quite a bit more economical to lose money in biodiesel that way, than to lose money in biodiesel via building a ‘landed’ biodiesel distribution depot with tanks and a Weights and Measures pump. Piedmont is now working on/has completed a pretty impressive tank project, but they’re working with quite different investment than the other biodiesel small-scale businesses I know of, so the project is within their reach.
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At the end of last month I packed up on a whim and flew out to North Carolina to check out Piedmont’s business, and the Blue Ridge Biofuels business, and ended up talking biodiesel business with a whole pile of people for about 5 days. My excuse to go out there was twofold- I’m planning a new renewable energy fair, so I wanted to see how the Southern Energy and Environment Expo is run, and because I’ve been diving into the biodiesel business world lately, I also wanted to go ’summit’ with various folks about their regulatory experiences and investment experiences. Basically, I wanted to go see how the non-bozos do it, after seeing lots of examples of how not to do it out here in that weird, weird West Coast place.

I got quite an earful on the East Coast for my trouble (and the Expo is amazing, but more on that later). I basically got a hotel room with Lyle for a couple of days during the Expo and we holed up and talked about biodiesel business and investment and regulations and strategy and The Big Picture and the Case Studies until my brain hurt.

We ended up going ’round and ’round about biodiesel distribution. Recently I’ve started to think it’s the death of some smaller biodiesel businesses who are trying to break into production as well- you can’t make money in it, there’s insane pricing instability from the wholesale level which customers dont’ understand. Many people look at Piedmont’s many-pronged approach (distribution, homebrewing, education/nonprofit arm/commercial/Piedmont Industrial) and decide to emulate it all right away- ignoring the fact that it took them years to develop all the prongs while they slugged away at the ‘30 gallon homebrew’ level. I suspect that before it all shakes out, we’ll have a lot of failed businesses (hell, Carolina Biodiesel is one already…)

In California ‘our’ people seem to be unable to get direct access to World Energy or other producers, so here the wholesale stuff is effectively ‘unavailable’ until a few middlemen take a cut and raise the price, and I’ve been watching Yokayo Biofuels lose their shirts on doing distribution for years now without getting anywhere. Now Piedmont is expanding their distribution operation beyond the tanker level- creating a fuel depot so they can eliminate the 1500 gallon runs to Charlotte and so as to be able to take delivery of the stuff direct from the fullsize tanker(s). They’re also building a plant and focusing on growth in distribution at the same time. Danger!!!

We went through the numbers on that a little, Lyle had a pretty convincing argument that their company has the focus and the people to keep up with the perils of distribution. I’m aware of several other folks who are starting up businesses trying that model- distribution and building a plant at the same time- and who dont’ have the numbers of people, the track record of success, and the developed focus, that Piedmont has. In many cases I suspect it’s a great way to fail in this business.

Small distributors provide a valueable service- they’re the first biodiesel usage and handling education for various unwitting consumers- and we’ve seen examples over and over again of how easy it is for petroleum gas stations to fail to deliver that, with resulting problems. I’m not going to go into that right now- I’ve written about the ‘Fairfax NAFT Gas experience’ at biodieselnow and elsewhere a few years ago- but it’s certainly a pain when something goes wrong and consumers dont’ know who to go to, to troubleshoot the problems (at NAFT we had a quality control problem from a big commercial producer). In many cases the problem gets blamed on ‘biodiesel’ in general rather than ‘bad biodiesel’ or inadequate cold weather performance information or something like that.

But to provide this valueable service of dedicated B100 distribution and education, folks are doing a serious cut in their potential earnings. I think Hope and Jennifer were trying to make enough (retailing at 15 cents a gallon over the wholesale cost) to pay themselves a salary of $200 a month or something like that last year. Yes, they had day jobs, and a business like ‘breaking new ground within the Berkeley Fire/Building Departments Bureaucracy’ was a pretty full-time job in itself and a gigantic ‘life savings’ drain.

They seem to be doing a lot better this year, having morphed into a co-operatively owned group (5 owners, all women from the Berkeley Biodiesel Co-op who’d worked together extensively before going into business).

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Lyle wrote up the following silliness about our trip to the SEE Expo (and don’t ask me what I actually said about that heat exchanger cause he got it wrong).

I’d basically told him and Leif what I know of the story of biodiesel distribution in the Bay Area- there was quite a sordid tale of gas stations carrying and discontinuing biodiesel sales, and a lot of weirdness that’s unique to our part of the world.

Lyle wrote:

Once everyone was in the car, Leif, Girl Mark and I started geeking out on all things biodiesel. By Winston Salem my interest was starting to fade, but they came alive with a spirited discussion of vacuum pumps. We stopped for dinner at a bizarre Italian place in the middle of nowhere, and the conversation was re-ignited when Girl Mark remarked that it was easy to file out the bumps on the reducing end of the average heat exchanger.

Her comment snapped Leif to attention, and as they waded into the concept, Evan and I proceeded to reflect on how our dinner guests were in fact beyond hope.

Back in the car, I was ready to fall asleep as I drove into Asheville, but the conversation cam around to the history of biodiesel distribution in Northern California, and this time it was me who hung on every word. Girl Mark talked about card lock systems gone by, and gas stations that carried B100, and brokers who flipped loads of fuel, and the community in general.

It was a remarkable and epic story, sort of like one that Homer might have recited in a theatre in the park, and Leif and I found ourselves riveted.

Leif would say, “Go back to the part where you were talking about territories,”

And I would say, “Back up a second. Did you say Achilles son of Peleus brought sorrow to the Acheans?”

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Well, today I was reading a non-biodiesel-related email list, and the following amusing observation was posted by someone (who needed biodiesel, NOW, and had an empty tote sitting around)- this guy had no idea of all about all the shenanigans that the small-scale biodiesel distributors have to go through to get the stuff in the first place:

Liam wrote:

“I’ve been noticing a pair of funky looking tanker trucks that meet up on the
old R.R. tracks ever so often. Today I decided to stick my nose in their
business and see what these hose ranglin’ hippys with tankers were up to.

Turns out they are from the “Peoples Fuel Cooperative” And they meet up at
the R.R. tracks every two weeks to exchange fluids. The driver of the
smaller tanker truck was more than happy to stick around and fill our tote
for us.

He also said he clould supply us with a regular fuel deliverys. The
trucks meet up every two weeks alternating tuesdays and ***days the next
meeting is ****day the *th. They are charging 3.60 per gallon.”

Yep, the scene of the crime was a really desolate piece of railroad track real estate in Berkeley. The fuel being exchanged was ASTM stuff direct from a major producer I think. The activity? Biodiesel Taco Truck goes to the next level- someone finally bought that scruffy tanker Oasis had looked at, and had become the next player in the Bay Area distribution scene. Somehow the ‘you guys are too small for big companies to deal with you’ problem is being solved- another newish player in town’s making it happen- a middleman with a cell phone and good “people skills". This guy owns no infrastructure himself. The Shadow Broker guy’s arranging the meetup, and other meetups like, to make it worth the producers’ time selling the entire truckload. He’s presumably making a cent or two, and making it possible for some of the B100 distributors to have ASTM fuel available from this producer. The hippies who bought the Scruffy Tanker are working at becoming the SF fueling station, doing delivery off their Biodiesel Taco Truck, and dreaming big with a nice big group of folks over there. Their plan seems to be working well and to be built on a solid ‘people’ base.

Since no one locally has a fueling depot for tankers to load and unload at (I was on the phone this week trying all my connections trying to find real estate for one), we’ve got the big producer linking hoses with the small distributor hippie operation at a random railroad siding near you.