Anyone heard of making our own diesel from used oi

Someone told me they know a guy that is doing it......wonder how they do it

A coworker of mine messed around with this for several years. He bought an old Mercedes to do it with. I forget which is which but direct or indirect injection makes a difference and Mercedes had the better option. He tried a lot of different things, he’s an extremely crafty and knowledgeable guy. He ended with waste oil ( machine lube and grinding oil) and I’m pretty sure he usually cut it with acetone, but successfully also used gasoline and…? Ya, something! Been a while. He never did any fuel system or engine damage, just the rest of the car was falling apart around him as it was old when he got it.

coworker had a Mercedes about 20 years ago that he ran on vegetable oil.. Got it from local restaurants.. They had to PAY people to haul it off, so he took it for FREE and was a benefit to both.... The had an electric heater under the back seat and ran the veggie thru it to warm it up so it would pump and burn in the winter.. Did it for several yeas.. Dont know if he still does it, that was YEARS ago.

Google knows many things.

Years ago, maybe early to mid 1980’s Wisconsin State Journal ran a series of articles about a guy that was also getting used cooking oil from fast food restaurants, filtered and running in a couple of Volkswagen diesel sedans. A month or so, after the final article in the newspaper was published, the Wisconsin State Department of Revenue dropped the hammer on the guy, came down on him like a ton of bricks. Couple weekends of stories once again in the Wisconsin State Journal, on how the revenue dept. was planning on prosecuting the guy big time. Fined him tens of thousands of dollars(if memory serves), confiscated all his equipment, threatening jail time, etc., they hit him hard.

My coworker did the waste fry oil thing too, worked but more fuss than the waste oil from work. Yeah the Mercedes is gone, but he still runs an Isuzu powered generator with the waste oil. It’s a unit he bought used out of a refer application. He’d run it more, but he lives in a sort of crowded sub on a lake and people would complain about the smell.

Tbone95 wrote: My coworker did the waste fry oil thing too, worked but more fuss than the waste oil from work. Yeah the Mercedes is gone, but he still runs an Isuzu powered generator with the waste oil. It’s a unit he bought used out of a refer application. He’d run it more, but he lives in a sort of crowded sub on a lake and people would complain about the smell.

Edited by Ray54 - 25 Sep 2023 at 10:35am

DonDittmar wrote: Interesting to note that back in the day Cummins actually had a system to burn used oil in their engines. It was called Centinal and you could purchase the system when you bought a new truck. There was a tank on the firewall you filled with CLEAN engine oil. After so many miles, the engine ECM would pump a small amount of used oil out of the pan and cycle it into the fuel stream. It would then pump clean oil out of the tank on the firewall and pump it into the pan. All you had to do was keep that tank topped off.  The benefits were 2 fold. 1), obvious fuel savings as you were burning some motor oil and 2), they allowed for extended oil change intervals because a portion of the engine oil was constantly being replaced. This was in the early 2000's Can you imagine what the EPA would think of this system now lol??? I wonder of used oil mixes with def???

I worked for a trucking company that had that exact system(for a few years), most of the engines crapped out at 650,000-700,000 miles. Top end of engines totally shot. Most engines were so far out of mfg parameters the ecm would kill the fuel flow going down the highway, some others the camshaft would fail, etc.

Edited by Lars(wi) - 25 Sep 2023 at 4:22pm

Son was doing it far a while , then the supply of fryer oil became a problem of obtaining . 
Next was when DOT started checking tanks on trucks and wanted fuel receipts as was checking on paid ROAD TAX -
  Had them want to audit my records but at the time I had no diesel trucks and when I mentioned I only used on road fuel in equipment and they could stick tanks on any diesel equipment - seems they lost interest in checking for off road fuel - in on road vehicles . 
  Some years back the bleed and feed oil change systems were being sold but now with catalyst  converters any oil added will create ash and plug units quickly .