Make Your Own Bio Diesel - King of the Hammers

It's downright un American

soaring gas prices have changed the way we live today on Xtreme 4x4. Ian and Jessi have got a way to put money back in your wallet with a system that will make your own biodiesel. Plus desert racing means rock crawling. When 43 trucks buy for bragging rights at ping of the Hammers.

Hey guys, welcome to Xtreme 4x4. Now, today we've put away the bender and we've packed up our welders and no, we are not going to tear into this 92 Ford F 250 diesel. Even though it's a truck that's probably pretty similar to what you guys drive every day. Instead, we're going to talk about a problem that all of us face, not just guys who build cars and trucks, but more importantly as a nation in general. And that is the price of fuel.

I mean, come on diesel fuel. It's about $4 a gallon, regular gasoline. Well, it's not that far behind.

And since the majority of us out there are using diesel trucks to pull our trail rigs to the trail and then we're driving them every day during the week, we're getting killed at the pump big time. And that means we don't have money left over for normal stuff, like repairs to our trail rig or parts or even just stuff we wanna buy every day, like, well, milk. But what are you gonna do about it?

Well, if you listen to the car companies, the answer is buy an economy car, get better gas mileage, save some money,

but is spending 12 grand on a Corolla just to get 29

MPG. Really worth it.

Well, we went ahead and ran the numbers and the answer, it's probably gonna surprise you.

Let's say a bare bones economy car cost $12,000. Now, for most, that's gonna be a car payment of about 350 bucks a month.

Now, the average commute is gonna land around 40 miles total each day,

add in 65 miles for weekend driving

and that's gonna be a total of 1060 miles of driving every month.

Now, at

like this diesel Ford here, it's probably gonna land around 14

MPG. Our new economy car will probably get around 29

MPG. Now, if we price our fuel out at $3.90

that means it's going to cost $285 a month to drive this truck that 1060 miles. Now, the car, it's only gonna cost us 100 and 40

$7 a month. Now, that may seem like a good deal on the surface. But here's the kicker in order to get back the initial investment of spending $12,000 on that economy car, it is gonna take you seven years worth of driving. And to me that's not a very good deal. You're better off just to keep the truck. Plus you're not gonna be hauling your garbage to the dump in the back of a small economy car.

So you're gonna keep your truck.

But what if there was a way to cut the cost of operating your diesel almost in half? Plus it's gonna be better for the environment than any greenie out there driving around in a hybrid.

Well, the answer is simple and it's called biodiesel. Now, I am sure some of you guys are sitting at home right now and you're thinking, you know what, this isn't gonna help me. I do not own a diesel powered pickup truck. Well, you have to think of the big picture here. Everything that you own at one time or another was delivered somewhere on the back of a diesel powered semi truck, tractor and trailer. And it's just simple economics that if the fuel inside that truck cost half as much money, much, well, what you bought would be cheaper as well. Now, before we get into cooking our own fuel, let's take a look at what exactly biodiesel is. It is an environmentally friendly, safe alternative fuel that you can use in any diesel engine, whether it be a daily driver, truck or car heavy equipment or even some farm machinery. Now, it's an approved fuel for use inside the United States by the EPA carb

as well as the doe. And it's undergone extensive testing for its sustainability, environmental impact as well as emissions.

But the big question always is, is where does biodiesel come from?

While diesel is made from a petroleum based fossil fuel biodiesel is made from plants primarily the soybean which is harvested and the proteins and oils are extracted to make food and cooking oil

that recycled oil is chemically processed through trans justification.

The result pure biodiesel or B 100.

But the future of bio may come from algae.

Yes. Common pond scum grown in greenhouses using waste water can produce upwards of 30,000 gallons of oil per acre per year

compared to just 220 gallons from soybeans. That's a lot,

which means one day we can have a network of fuel stations pumping biodiesel that was simply waste.

Now, since there aren't biodiesel fuel stations all across this country quite yet. What option do you have? Well, it's pretty simple. You're gonna make your own fuel using an extraction system like this one from extreme biodiesel. Now this will mix our

activator as well as oil together and then dry, filter it. So we have a clean biofuel that we can burn in any diesel engine but the cool thing about this kit is we're not going to be using virgin oil in our little refinery. We're going to be using garbage.

This is waste vegetable oil and most restaurants will give you this stuff for free out of their deep fryer when they're done with it because they normally have to pay to have the stuff hauled off by a rendering company. Now, before you go and grab any oil from any restaurant, ask to see the actual jug of new fryer oil that they're going to pour into the deep fryer and make sure it says clear vegetable oil. If it says shortening on it don't use it, it won't make good fuel. Just keep looking for another restaurant

coming up. The desert guys love to go fast while rock crawlers love getting technical. What happens when both extremes are combined in a single course. Find out a king of the hammers next.

Welcome back to Xtreme 4x4. Now, of course, we all love saving money. That's why today we're showing you how to cook up your own batch of biodiesel.

The first step in the process is to get all of our oil into a barrel to get ready for extraction.

We're using a 55 gallon steel drum with an integrated drum heater to get the oil up to 100 and 40 degrees before pumping it into the machine.

Once the oil is hot enough, we will draw it into the main chamber using the pickup tube attached to the control panel.

Now, before we make any fuel, we need to mix it really well inside this chamber.

So we simply close these two valves and let it run through for about 15 to 20 minutes.

Now, we need to know how much methanol and Koh to add into this unit right here. And to do that, we're going to take a sample of our oil, perform a simple P test.

It all starts by making a concentrated solution of Ko eight and distilled water in the supplied red top bottle.

Then with pure methanol in the green bottle,

we can mix 10 mL of pure methanol with 1 mL of oil and stir it until it's completely mixed,

then three drops of the PH solution.

And finally, we add a measured amount of the tran solution from the red bottle

and mix until the ph is a nine. We're looking for a bluish green color.

Then we record the amount of tiran used.

Now, all we have to do is plug all the values we have into the titration calculator on the extreme biodiesel website.

Now we used 8.5 mL of our tran solution. And when we calculate it, it'll tell us exactly how much oil methanol and lie to use. In our case, it's going to be 1277 g.

Later on, we'll break free from the big oil companies and light the burner on our own biodiesel processor. Just think of all the money we're going to save. Stay tuned

in extreme four by fours event of the week. We're off to the Mojave Desert for a race like no other

mixing desert and rock racing.

I've been dreaming about an event like this for a long time. 43 drivers came out to the

Mojave Desert for the first ever king of the Hammers race. It's a huge event. I think this, uh, king of the Hammers event is the first time.

Desert and rock crawling have gotten together a 50 mile one lap loop. Of course features 40 miles of open desert racing. We're in the hobby desert, the toughest desert land in the United States and 10 of the Hammer Trail. I think it's probably, in my opinion, the coolest concept race. Jeff Noel and David Cole brought this concept race to life. Bottom line racers like racing. We tried to come with something that's really gonna push the limits. What they came up with

is the toughest one day off road event in the world. This is the Baja 1000 of rock crawling. It's pretty gnarly out there

with names like Jackhammer, claw, Hammer, and Sledgehammer. The Hammer's portion of the race wasn't just gnarly. It was pure evil. It just seems that the most constant nonstop, big rocks and obstacles is here. These are hardcore rock crawling trails.

The rocks here are brutal. This rock out here is jagged. It's nasty.

It will cut your tires, it will cave in your vehicle. It'll rip you apart if you don't know how to maneuver through. This type of,

it didn't get any easier when they hit the desert.

These vehicles are not made for 18 inch whoop sections at 60 miles an hour.

So it's gonna be some excitement out there.

You gotta watch out for the danger points out in the desert because that can end your race in a hurry. They've got the whoop trails, they've just got washouts, cross grain.

You know, you gotta be ready for it all. You got to pay attention no matter how ready they were. Trouble was a constant companion. I think attrition is gonna be huge. We're probably gonna be driving over tires and tubes and

goods.

It's a thinking race. Like you can't push your car too hard. You're gonna break it. You can't go 1000 miles an hour through the rock se

or you definitely could drive faster than your car would really want to go in the desert. So I think you gotta pick an achievable pace. Once the race started, they quickly learned that no pace guaranteed survival. Plus the rear cable shift is here.

We don't have no rear.

We got front wheel drive, flat tire

still

good

and no break. Yeah, I forgot about that. Littering. The course was a trail of destruction.

It's total carnage out there. You know what I mean? It's,

it's like you're just driving it to the scene of the crash early on Jr Reynolds was out front.

His lead didn't last long. First, we had a little vapor lock problem that slowed us down about

eight or 10 minutes

and then we came back and uh, tore the front L

mount off the car

and we were saying goodbye to everybody and we went 10 ft and we got a flat tire. What else could happen? Now with the flat fixed Jr was ready to get back in the game. We've had at least three hours of delays. Now, get back on the road here. We're gonna still beat some people at the king of the Hammers. That kind of optimism only gets you so far.

And for Jr Reynolds, it got him 25 ft.

Upper L

mount broke again.

Yeah.

And as far as I know there's no warranty on it.

So I think it's out of my pocket. This time,

the breakage these drivers had to endure only made them more determined. Oh, we're gonna fix it. And eventually

right

here,

that's what we

plan.

This

is

beating you to death

one minute,

slide open the next.

It's, it's perfect.

Welcome back to Xtreme 4x4 where we're right in the middle of brewing up our own batch of biodiesel using an extreme biodiesel extraction kit. Now, so far we've heated up and pumped in our waste vegetable oil into the main chamber and it's circulating we did a Ph balance test to determine how much methanol and Koh, we needed to add to the mix to have good clean burn and biodiesel. And now all we have to do is put both those substances into this chamber, the methanol as well as the potassium hydroxide.

Now, this is a good time to talk about some of the safety precautions when working with these two chemicals. Now, Koh is a short form version for potassium hydroxide and when you purchase it, it will come with a material safety data sheet to outline all the hazards of the substance. Now, we're using a flake formed Koh and that will eliminate any dust that gets kicked up when you pour it into the hopper because the dust is toxic.

What's going to happen here is our methanol is going to get pumped up and showered over top of that Koh and it's going to create a substance in here that's known as Meth

Ide. Now, before we can mix the meth oxide into the main chamber to turn our waste vegetable oil into biodiesel, it's going to need to circulate for about 20 to 30 minutes. So this is the perfect time to head back to Johnson Valley and find out who got crowned king of the Hammers,

both the desert and rock race. All the red sections are rock crawling sections and the other is just regular desert rig set up for the king of the hammers had drivers scratching their heads right up to race time. We've been spending the last couple of nights revolving shocks and getting them tuned where they can handle the desert

and do well on the rocks.

You kind of, kind of riding a fine line there. Our suspension on this vehicle is set up more for the rock rolling sections than it is the desert section.

But we're gambling

on that hoping that we can do real well in the rocks, maybe not quite so good in the desert.

But that, that's our strategy. That's the way we're approaching this race. Pro Desert racer, Pete

son

wasn't a believer in the rock first strategy. They don't know what all this desert is going to do to their cars because they don't race for 60 miles at a time. They just do little short stints and

I think it's going to be a big surprise for both.

Leaving the gate one the time at 32nd intervals, the start position from a half. We drew 34.

The trails are really tight. There's some bottlenecks up there.

Realistically, I don't know if

anyone else had the top 15 can win this thing, but we'll see rock crawling. Great. Shannon Campbell started last. They're like, Shannon, you're starting last. And I thought they were joking and I was like, what? But once I found out I drew last, you know, what do you do? What Shannon did will be talked about by future generations.

He powered through the field dominated the rocks and blazed through the desert. You ride that junk. He crossed the finish line in three hours to become the first ever king of the hammers past the entire field came in here and it was done his interviews and laughed and by the time second place came across the finish line, he's, he's astonishing. I mean, a

phenomenal driver doing that. That was, that was cool. I mean, it, it'll give me something to tell my kids about later on. You know,

we're back on extreme where we are about to turn 25 gallons of waste vegetable oil into cool clear biodiesel. Once we add our meth

ide mixture,

all we have to do now is turn the recirculating valve to the eight o'clock position, open the jet valve and hit the switch

right away. You'll notice the amount of liquid in the main chamber is gonna rise five gallons as the meth oxide is added.

And the entire mixture needs to be circulated for one hour.

Now, the hour long circulation is just to make sure everything gets mixed. Then this whole mixture is going to have to sit for 12 hours. Now, during that 12 hour period, what's going to happen is the glycerin is going to interact with the koh, it's going to become heavier than the oil itself.

It's going to sink to the bottom. The methanol is going to bond with the base oil material and that is what's going to become our clean, clear biodiesel fuel. Now, while we wait for this to mix and then sit for 12 hours, we're going to go ahead and have a look at some of the numbers with this fuel,

pure biodiesel or B 100 has been tested by the EPA. And how does this grab you?

67% decrease in unburned hydrocarbon.

48% less carbon monoxide and 100% less sulfites

cost.

Well, we checked around, got our methanol from VP fuels at five bucks a gallon.

We've used $5 worth of koh.

And that means our biodiesel is costing us a buck 20 a gallon.

So after letting the whole mixture sit for 12 hours, we went ahead and drained the glycerin off the bottom of the main chamber. Now that believe it or not, we can use to make soap later on. And the rest of the bio we push through this two hour filter kit and what we end up with is cool, clear biodiesel ready to be dumped into our pickup truck. And it's honestly that easy to make your own biofuel. So get your friends together, go in on a kit as a group and sit on your garage on the weekend and make your own fuel. You'll have no problem finding buddies willing to help you burn up biodiesel when you're sharing it at a buck 20 a gallon.