Brian Cook and Sole Technologies were always super generous and amazing to work with as I was getting started with ‘Grease Not Gas’ and all things vegetable oil related. One of the first buses we had was supported by 32 and utilized as a summer camp van at High Cascade Snowboard Camp. I painted the bus orange, welded a custom fuel tank/bench seat and installed the conversion system. We had a fifty-five gallon drum right outside of the kitchen at HCSC and it was really fun to show the campers how we could up-cycle the waste French fry oil into fuel.
When camp was over, we drove the bus down to Sole Tech headquarters in Lake Forest, CA and displayed the vehicle to the staff there. Pictured below is also an ad that 32 ran in Snowboarder Magazine in support of the ‘Wheels on Meals’ tour.
While I was in California I can remember that Brian and I took an experimental approach to converting his VW TDI. In his garage, surrounded by every cool vehicle you could ever imaging, we routed ‘heat tape’ down into the fuel tank and up to the injectors. The theory was that with a power inverter you could draw from the two deep-cycle batteries to get resistance heat into the fuel system to start up and shut down on grease, with no need for a diesel start-up/flush tank. I don’t remember ever hearing how it worked out, but I was impressed that he was willing to guinea pig the whole thing and just see what happened.