James Purser [INSERT WITTY CATCHPHRASE HERE]

With thanks to Tilly for this recipe

Okay, I'm going to be putting together this post as I go through the process.

Ingredients:

1 Litre WVO (Waste Vegetable Oil - filtered through coffee filters)

250Ml Methanol

6gm Caustic Soda (this may vary depending on what the titration shows)

Tools:

Rubber Gloves

1 Glass

1 Plastic Softdrink Bottle (1.5l) - Must be dry

1 Teaspoon Measure

1 Mixing Spoon

1 Measuring Container

Step 1: Create Your Methoxide and heat your oil

Before you do anything you need to prepare your methoxide.

• Take one glass container, pour Methanol into container and add Caustic Soda. Mix vigorously with spoon until all of the Caustic Soda has dissolved. This will cause the mixture to heat up so be careful.

• Heat your oil. Nominal temperature is 55 degrees celcius.

Step 2: Mixing The Oil and Methoxide To Start the Reaction

Once you have your oil heated and the methoxide mixed you must combine the two.

• Take your dry softdrink bottle and place a funnel in the top.
• Pour your heated oil into the bottle

• Pour your methoxide into the bottle
• Remove funnel and screw on top tightly
• Vigorously shake bottle for at least 10 seconds. I shook for 40 to ensure complete mixing

Once you've completed the above steps you should notice a distinct colour change in the oil. Ours went from a very light yellowy brown to a dark chocolate.

Step 3: Wait

Now comes the hardest part I guess. Waiting. Once you have mixed the methoxide and oil, put the bottle down and leave it for an hour. According to the recipe you should start noticing the byproducts of the reaction start to settle out within ten minutes.

On this batch, we achieved pretty good seperation. By 12 minutes we had plenty of glycerine and crud at the bottom of the bottle (the dark matter) and an increasingly clear yellow fluid on top of that.

Final Analysis:

Well this is what we've ended up with:

As you can see the reaction has completed. There is a defined layer of glycerine and other by-products at the bottom of the bottle. The remaining oil is still cloudy, however it still has to be washed and filtered.

All in all I'm not unhappy with the way this went. For my first attempt at making Bio-diesel it wasn't a complete failure and while I wouldn't be putting this into my mothers van (she runs on either mixed or pure bio) it's been a great learning experience.