My personal response to the increase in fuel costs has been to ride my
push-bike to work a couple of times a week, as this is a 60km round
trip it took some "work up" before I could get there at all, never mind
get home again 8 or 9 hours later. The good thing is that I can now do
it relatively easily and aside from lower weekly fuel bills my middle
age spread that was so handsomely helped by my 4 years return to
University has also started to shrink and I now fit back into clothes I
haven't been able to wear for nearly 20 years - a further cost saving,
but not the point of this post.

When you ride a push bike you notice a lot more about the roads you
travel on than you do when ensconced in an air-conditioned cocoon. For
instance I've always regarded the Cook Highway from the beach where I
live, the the city of Cairns as well, pretty much flat. I now know that
this is not the case and I find myself looking forward to the next
level bit, or even joy of joys, the next slightly downhill bit that
means that I can either back off a bit and maintain current speed or
alternatively maintain effort and speed up.

Aside from a greater awareness of terrain, you also quickly gain an
understanding of the cretinous behavior of the average motorist, but
that is another story.

The thing I wanted to say is that you become much more aware of the
smell of vehicles as they pass you, and it is this that leads me to my
"interesting observation".

In the past weeks I've become aware of an increasing number of diesel
trucks, cars and 4WDs that when they pass me they leave behind a
pleasant odor not at all unlike that found in a nice clean fish and
chip shop. The different smell is quite noticeable when compared to the
stench from petrol driven vehicles and even other diesel vehicles - the
smell from some telling me that the annual dump of excess heating oil
has begun already....

But going back to the "fish and chip" smell which used to be a rarity
but is now becoming and every day experience I suspect that quite a lot
of people, and even small firms are batching up their own bio-diesel.

The other day when I was at Coles and saw Coles brand "blended
vegetable oil" on special for 90c for a 1 litre bottle I was tempted to
contact a wholesaler and find out what the damm stuff costs per litre
in bulk.

If you are lucky enough to have a diesel with an "in-line" pump, you
can with a bit of fiddling around run them on direct unprocessed
vegetable oil without mucking about with trans-estering it with
Methanol to make biodiesel.

I'm tempted, notwithstanding that my previous experience with
bio-diesel led me to believe that it was non-viable, but then diesel
wasn't $1.40 a litre then either....Might start looking around for an
old Peugeot or Merc diesel, or even an early cruiser or patrol I think
to test this out.

anyone else thinking on similar lines?


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