Happy Earth Day!

Happy Earth Day to everyone. This is a quick note to any of you who are still subscribed to my greatly neglected blog (you certainly have noticed that I’ve yet to even update my theme from the default K2 design since migrating to Wordpress nearly two months ago…and I promise that there will be more activity on this blog in the near future, but thanks for still staying tuned in the meantime).

But on to more important topics with a quick but fun post. As mentioned, today is Earth Day, and about 35 minutes ago I closed an auction on eBay for a beautiful Anaheim-based 1985 Mercedes-Benz 300D, the Turbo Diesel variety. Consider this my birthday present to our planet…and here’s why:

I bought this slick ride with the plan to convert it to run on vegetable oil.

Lovecraft Biofuels, which is right down the street from my house, can do the conversion for less than $1000 all-in. For those of you not hip to the vegetable oil movement, any diesel car can be converted with minimal cost to enable it to run on any combination of diesel, biodiesel, clean/straight vegetable oil (svo) or waste vegetable oil (wvo). Clean veggie oil can be obtained in bulk at places like Costco or Sam’s Club and supposedly works out to about $3 a gallon (as long as you have the arm strength to lug about 100 lbs of oil to the parking lot once a week or so). Or, even better, there are people who will deliver waste vegetable oil (which can be collected for free from restaurants anywhere) to your house in bulk for about $2 a gallon! The great thing about the vegetable oil conversion is that the exhaust is nearly 100% biodegradable. And (supposedly!) the car won’t really lose any power or torque after the transition.

I’ll keep you posted with updates about the conversion process and my experiences obtaining oil. In the meantime, here’s my cherry new ride!

Exterior (Pearl Black)

Interior (Cherry Red!)

This entry was posted on April 22nd, 2007 and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.