End of an Era

I believe I've sent you this link before Bill:
http://running_on_alcohol.tripod.com/

The drawings and build instructions were about $30.

You will need and ATF licence but that doesn't cost much and in the US
they assume that if you get a licence for a stated purpose (fuel) that
that's what it's for. Here in Canada you are assumed to be evilly
making moonshine.

Cheers,
Alan

 

http://running_on_alcohol.tripod.com/

Will tell you. A few batches on a given day will keep you running for a
couple weeks. You will need a flex-fuel car (E85) and don't forget to
add the gasoline to the mix (15% (by volume I believe)).

At this scale it is a batch process. If you do it right you use waste
heat from batch 1 to pre-heat batch 2 (post fermented batches), and
waste heat from batch 2 to pre-heat batch 3 and so on. A 40 gallon
"batch" of fermented mash will take about 1 - 2 hours to process and
produce about 4 - 5 gallons of ethanol. YMMV as it depends on what the
mash source is and how well it fermented. The "waste" mash can be fed
to pigs or cattle; possibly used as a fertilizer.

As a feedstock for the mash find local breweries/wineries and take away
their "leavings" and bad batches of beer/wine. This will need little or
no fermenting.

Farmers molasses (that hasn't had the sugar removed)
Rotten, spoiled, wasted fruit and "sweet" veggies (local markets,
restaurants, etc.)
(Corn, carrots, and other high sugar veggies).
You'll need yeasts to start the fermenting too...

Cheers,
Alan

 

A batch of fermeted mash is typically 10 - 15% ethanol. And you get
pretty much all of it out. More mash, more ethanol.

Cheers,
Alan

 

Recently?

 

Thanks for the compliment! But judge me against your best, not
against some of the people we're meeting here.

 

LUDICROUS! One can STILL walk, ride a horse, ride a bicycle,

I can cite several of them, but should send them to you as a pdf file
attachment.......Is your email able to accept such things? - I will try, in
any case.....

 

Yes....When the feds show up to confiscate your house, you blow several of
them away first.....It might not help you any, but the next guy gets a big
day in court first.......

 

Radar doesn't "search" the vehicle.....Measuring its speed externally is a
different thing. And checkpoints where all the drivers are checked for
alcohol possession, or blood level are still frequently thrown out by the
courts.....Like most unconstitutional things, they do them anyway, and make
the injured party fight it to a high enough court before he wins....In the
meantime, he goes broke, so it usually isn't worth it, and that's how people
lose their constitutional rights.....Petty ass local municipal courts do
things like this all the time.......

 

Thanks for the link.....I use ethanol to clean my trumpets with. (I can use
propanol, but the smell of it makes me sick) Down in California, I couldn't
buy ethanol in a drug store, so I bought some from a supplier in the bay
area....It was $40 a gallon, and 1/2 of that was the federal taxes......I
had to buy 4 gallons minimum, so I found 3 guys who wanted to go in with me,
and we each bought a gallon.....Of course, a gallon of ethanol is enough to
clean a trumpet for life, so I still have over 1/2 gallon left over, and
that was about 20 years ago. Now, I notice that I can buy a pint of 70%
ethanol from our local Rite Aid Drug store here in Salem, Oregon.......

 

Is being considered "far superior" to an American only FAINT praise?

THAT'S what you use all those guns for! Foot-shooting!

 

Here in the UK, it is (or maybe was) considered unacceptable for
police to check drivers leaving a pub car park unless they were
visibly committing an offence. You don't need a constitution in order
to make silly rules.

 

Reminds me of a story my dad told me....He said there was a distillery in
his home town of Bristol, Tennessee when he was a kid. (Back around 1900)
Every afternoon, they would open up the big valve, and let the used sour
mash flow out to the trough for the pigs they kept behind their place. My
dad would go down and sit on the fence and watch.....He said that for the
first ten minutes or so, not one drop of the mash would make it to the
trough....the pigs would be jammed up against the end of the pipe, drinking
so fast that the trough would remain dry....Then, after about 10 minutes, a
small trickle would get to the trough for the pigs that were waiting
there......It was the best show in town.........

 

Yeah, but the heavier the vehicle the safer, and so everyone goes for the
heaviest they can get and/or afford....Soon the streets are full of tanks
that weigh 10,000 pounds each, with their occupants glaring out or their
little armored windows at each other.....Wouldn't it be better if they all
went for the lightest vehicle they could find? - Then we wouldn't be paying
to haul all that scrap iron around with us all the time......I guess the
only way to reach that level of sophistication is for the price of the fuel
to go through the roof, so nobody can afford to drive the tank.......

 

Yeah, but not in the Land Of The Free. Everyone ELSE could drive a
lightweight, which would leave ME all the more impregnable in my tank.
Social responsibility? Nah! I can AFFORD it, didn't you hear me?

 

What did he get?

Is this like the "jaywalking" offence? Here, we have the freedom to
walk into traffic at will. Luckily we have socialised medical care
too (Just. Well, it's excellent for things like road accidents.)

 

I forget now exactly, but it was a fine ......It's all really about
money.........

It varies here....They will be lax about it for several years, and then they
will have a "crackdown" where they give out lots of jaywalking
tickets.....then the fervor will die off, and they will become lax
again.......
They do much the same thing with seatbelts.....

 

Just so you know, it's water. Water and ethanol form what's known as an
"azeotrope" when the mash (no matter what kind--grain, cornstalks,
whatever) is distilled. To make absolute ethanol (100% ethanol, _NOT_
the same as Absolut vodka), other processes not involving distillation
are used to remove the water.

 

There will still be those who will drive a smaller car. It's human
nature.
And, even if everyone suddenly discovered that smaller cars got better
mileage, and then suddenly no one needed larger vehicles (through some
feat of magic), how do we shrink trucks down to under 3000 pounds?

The reality is, even if the CAFE standard were raised to 40mpg, larger
passenger vehicles would still be needed; a fact that eludes some.

--
Hillary Clinton was sworn
into the Senate Thursday
with her hand on a Bible
which was held by her husband
Bill. You could see it was
an old dog-eared family Bible.
It still has the yellow
highlighting on the passages
that say oral sex is not adultery.

 

I don't know, but it has, "Do not take internally" written all over
it.....The gallon tin that I bought in California thirty years or so ago,
was as pure as you can get, and could be drunk if you were into that sort of
thing......It's what the submarine sailors used to call "everclear"....They
used it for torpedo fuel......Not too bad if you cut it 50-50 with orange
juice.........

 

Terribly sorry. No insult intended.