Methane: In the beggining

My brothers and i decided we wanted a renewable, burnable fuel source. After looking at hydrogen and ethanol that either ended up a total stuff ups or decided it was not worth the effort to make we turned to methane a by product and does it burn.

I started by digging a hole.
When the dirt is hard and you're digging with a crow bar and shovel this takes a while, like a year with a few accidents along the way.

Utensils were invented to asist in the shaping of this hole for our use. finally we ended up with a hole 1400 deep and 1000 in diametre. And that was the easy bit.

Biodiesel: Finding a diesel engine.

Here is a picture of my beautiful 1976 VW Golf LS, taken in late 2006.


I found a web forum specialising in all watercooled volkswagens. On the forum, i found a guy who wrecks all sorts of watercooled volkswagens. I put the word out, and he found me a 1.5l diesel engine out of a 1979 Golf GLD, which he was willing to get rid of for $350 with transmission.
The engine had apparently had the head rebuilt very recently, with new rings, and a reconditioned injector pump. The bottom end had not been reconditioned, and after running for only a couple of hours after the rebuild, it had grabbed a main bearing on the crankshaft, meaning that the crankshaft would require either grinding or replacing, and the main bearings replaced.

This is where i came in. I took the word of the guy who sold it to me that it was a good engine, and set about getting it in running order. Not quite as simple as it could have been, because for a start, i couldn't afford $350 at that point in time, so i had to go grovelling to Adrian, who lent me the cash for the sake of science. :) (much to the grizzling of his wife ;))I firstly stripped the engine, and cleaned it all up.Then i pulled out the crankshaft, where i found some serious marking on the no 2 main bearing, and some scuffing of a couple of the bearing journals on the crankshaft.
I decided i would need to either grind the crankshaft, or get a new one.
Luckily, i have a spare golf LS petrol engine at home (in central NSW), and the crankshaft out of the 1.6l engine is exactly the same as the diesel engine. That's a perfect example of efficient engineering by Volkswagen. They don't design a new component, if a suitable component already exists in their inventory.

Well, i recognised that it made sense to replace the crankshaft, main, and big end bearings, and all bottom end seals. It would cost me about $200 to get all these parts. I finally saved up enough cash to buy them, and at that stage, i was starting writing my thesis for my Mechanical engineering degree, so there was a lull in proceedings of about 12 months.....

Biodiesel: beginnings

Us three brothers have been interested in biofuels for quite a while now. I think it's the thought of getting free stuff that compelled us to be keen about biofuels. I remember discussing biodiesel with Adrian when we first found out about it- "Wow, how good would that be?- you could run your car for FREE!"
We initially looked into it, and saw that you needed methanol to complete the biodiesel reaction, and for some stupid reason, decided that since Methanol costs about $1 a litre, it would not be economically viable..(I think the price of diesel was around 90c back then).

We revisited it a couple of years later, and realised that in fact you only require 20% methanol in the biodiesel reaction, and having seen the diesel price rise to more than $1.30 a litre.. A methanol source was found, and it was realised that methanol can be bought for around $1 a litre.

This basically means that if we could get free waste oil from fish and chip shops, we could make a litre of biodiesel for 20c a litre!

So the first problem was: If we go and make a million litres of biodiesel, what are we going to test it in? We don't have a vehicle with a diesel engine that we would be willing to put possibly dodgy home made diesel fuel.
Our current cars at the time were : Adrian had a nice new diesel navara, and i had a 1.6l petrol 1976 golf...
A quick look on the web found that MK1 golfs actually came out with diesel engines.. They were a 1.5l Naturally aspirated engine, putting out 37kW ( a reduction in power compared to the petrol engine)..
I figured that if i could find one for fairly cheap, i could whack it into the golf, and Voila, i would have a test bed for the biodiesel project.

Welcome

Welcome

This blog has been set up, so that a few brothers can share details of a number of projects. Some of the projects might also be of interest to others.

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home methane production home biodiesel methane from shit methane from poo renewable energy diesel engine VW golf bio-diesel biogas bio-gas renewable energy projects home project