We Can Spell Chemistry; We Just Can’t Do It...

Purgatory Cove Fish Dock and Marina

Well, it’s been a slow week here at Purgatory Cove. Kinda quiet, too, as Lefty and Wade are both recovering from their last (mis)adventure. Seems Wade has a habit of watching those educational channels on his 10” TV. That, in itself is an adventure as there isn’t any cable out here at the Cove. So whatever he gets is kinda fuzzy and hard to understand.

Anyway, he’s been hearin about makin your own fuel from used french fry oil. He always thought the deep fryer oil at Tooties should be changed more often than it is so it seemed like a good idea to try out this new process.

Sam was more than a little skeptical but went along with it. Actually, he was more interested in what seemed like a good excuse to visit Nancy, the waitress at Tooties. In any case, he started bringing back the oil, bucket by bucket.

Wade had moved a couple of the old 55-gallon barrels inside the boat shed. He figured, since nobody would be consuming the oil, he didn’t need to clean them out. At last count he had an old antifreeze barrel, a couple of outboard oil drums and a no-name drum they swiped from the fertilizer plant.

After a couple of months, Wade thought he had enough old oil to start. And believe me, after a couple of months, that oil was ripe. This whole process depended on Wade remembering the things he’d seen on the TV shows. The problem with that is that Wade only watches TV after a couple of long necks, says it makes the programs make more sense. The other problem is that he often falls asleep in the middle of the show and only wakes up at the end.

He did remember that the process needed alcohol and lye to turn the oil into usable fuel. The lye was no problem, the grocery and unclaimed freight store in town had a couple of cases of the stuff slowly deteriorating in the back room.

The alcohol was a little bit more of a problem. Wade would have liked to use Sam’s Special Recipe, but it would take just too much, Sam would be sure to notice. As it was, Wade did take a little. To that he added some white lightening that came from a still that had a lead soldered radiator for a cooling coil. To top it off he added some old alcohol based horse liniment from the unclaimed freight place.

It must have been at this point of the show that Wade fell asleep, because he stood there scratchin his head, and other parts, wondering what to do next. Here’s where Lefty stood up to the challenge. He reckoned he’d had a chemistry set when he was a kid and this was just up his alley.

He took to mixin up the lye with some water and dumped it, along with the alcohol mix and the used french fry oil into a couple of the empty drums. They immediately started to bubblin and gurglin to the point they guys were afraid they might explode.  After a bit, the barrels settled down and the boys started agitatin them by rolling the barrels back and forth in the boat shed.

When Lefty was finally satisfied that the process was complete, he hoisted up the first barrel with the fork lift and started filtering out the home made fuel.

About this time, he Judge stopped by to check out his boat and see what the guys were up to. Wade proudly explained their experiment and how much they were going to save by not having to pay four bucks a gallon for gas. The Judge rocked back on his heels and asked both of them if they realized that this process made biodiesel fuel, not gasoline. Well, that really put a damper on the whole deal as there wasn’t a diesel engine at Purgatory Cove, not counting the road grader the county road crew lost. Lefty looked at Wade and Wade allowed as that was probably a place where he’d fell asleep.

There was a silver lining to this escapade, though. The fertilizer company bought all the mix for use by their pesticide division.

Other than that, it’s been a slow week here in Purgatory Cove.