Karmen, I have to get a tad serious and technical for once

We've been doing bio-diesel for ages here where an imperial gallon costs $9.43 Canadian.

When Rudolf Diesel first came up with the idea of a compression ignition engine, where the compressing of just air in the cylinder was enough to ignite the injected fuel, he wasn't thinking of fuel oil at all like we have today. He used a waste product that was stockpiling by the millions of tons, coal dust. The essence of the engine was to consume this free fuel at the time; he used a HP air injection system back then but the ash produced by coal dust wrecked the engine quite quickly.

In fact many innocuous things will explode quite well if vaporised either by heat or mechanically, the injectors of a diesel engine do this by spraying the fuel through apertures measured in microns using tens of thousands of pounds pressure to do so. The spray is actually like fog being so fine.

This allows every miniscule drop of fuel to be surrounded by air and therefore burn. Almost all oils will therefore burn quite happily when atomised like this, indeed, try cooking flour; just a good pinch in a short cardboard tube (plain or self-raising), like a toilet roll tube, and puff a SMALL cloud into the air. Light it with your Zippo and beware it will go off with a quite violent woomph.

Flour mills have to take extreme caution about ignition sources and there have been serious explosions demolishing the complete buildings in the past.

Over here it is common knowledge that old cooking oil, allowed to settle, filtered and treated with a few percent of a catalyst like turps substitute, makes perfect diesel fuel. In some areas people clearing the shelves of supermarkets have caused so much hassle to the stocking systems that they limit people to 2 litres each.

Having made the oil here, we have to tell the authorities its to be used as a road fuel and pay the miniscule taxes to make it wholly legal, but with fuel taxes at some 85% of the total price you can bet the loophole will be closed soon.

South Africa grew most of its diesel fuel during the days of sanctions, it doesn't take many acres of sun flowers to make enough oil to run your Land Rover for a year, try a Google search for bio-diesel, there's heaps of info on it.

Maybe, I'll wake Ball-Spinnington, or maybe we'll enjoy the peace and quiet. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .


R.