This is how it happened.
One day i got a call. It was L (to become Grandpa). He told me there were plans in the works to take a road trip. This was not to be just any road trip, we would have a big yellow school bus. As the plan evolved, we got funding to convert an old yellow school bus running on diesel into an old yellow school bus running on waste vegetable oil. Thus W(e)VOW was born.
Copyright © 2010, Taylor Gair
There was a lot of work to be done once the bus was acquired in North Carolina. Firstly it was driven down by grandpa and JD.
All the seats were ripped out save for four in the front, two turned to face each other with a table in between. Two sets of bunk beds were built in the back, in hindsight, maybe not the best place for beds. Couches and a futon filled the rest of the space. We wired a sound system and some outlets. We upgraded interior lights, and added supplementary christmas lights. Dumpster diving efforts gave us cushions and foam for our beds, T’s mother made velcro curtains for our windows. Even though a bus is big (“Dude, its a bus.”) Eleven people and everything needed to sustain them (oh, plus a generator) takes up a lot of space, so a trailer hitch ensured we could always carry on.
The conversion went slower. The full tale involves a marathon work session, the Mississippi Gulf Coast and an alcoholic welder who rose at 5 am and started work at “bud light o’clock.” An old 55 gallon propane tank was repurposed as our veggie oil tank. A pump mounted under the bus would draw oil through a strainer and force it through two oil filters (a 25 and a 10 micron filter, in series) before it filled the tank. One additional filter would remove water from the fuel before it was sent to the engine. A switch controlled whether the engine drew fuel from the diesel tank or the veggie oil tank.
The conversion was ‘finished’ hours before we were set to leave Starkville: at 6 am, 21 May 2010. It was untested, but we were ready to go.
Posted by jrtaff 
