Gateway Drug

I'm not really into cars or trucks. I never would have bought the Dodge out of some guy's yard had I not had Rachel's backup and mechanical support.

But it is hard to confess such a thing now that I am completely submerged in transportation and fuel issues. Many of the people that I hang with know body types and makes and models and subtle changes introduced to different cars and trucks by the year. I always feel bad when my eyes glaze over during such conversations.

I have a vague sense of vendors and brands, but I am not really into what's turbo charged and what's not, and which engine maker has how many liters of this or that. I couldn't care less, and I always feel a little bit guilty about this.

I first confessed this to Girl Mark when we were in Asheville together, and she shrugged.

"Cars are the gateway drug," she said, before moving on to the next item in the conversation.

At that moment I was absolved of all guilt about not really caring about cars. I took her comment to mean that for many people their love of vehicles leads them into the sustainability conversation.

I believe the essence of the gateway drug is that you start the kid on tobacco, and it leads to alcohol, which leads to marijuana, which somehow leads to heroin. Or something like that. I've never really subscribed to that theory when it comes to drugs, but I think it has a lot of merit when it comes to biodiesel.

There are tons of folks who adore the TDI technology, purely for technology's sake, and it incidentally leads to biodiesel, which gets them hooked, and leads them into looking at their ecological footprint, and their carbon consumption in general.

Which is to say there are lovers of Mercedes and Volkswagen who incidentally come to biodiesel, and the vehicles are the gateway drugs.

Having said that I should also say that I have been working for the past couple of years on getting a late model Mercedes on the road. I once had a helper who effortlessly collected sedans, which piled up at Summer Shop. He spun off into the stratosphere, and I kept working on the idea of parts cars, and donor vehicles with the idea of getting a single "Creampuff" on the road.

One of my obstacles to doing this was having the right mechanic. I didn't have the time, or the tools, or the skills or the passion to pull it off. And the local mechanic community repeatedly brushed me off.

I started with Kevin from Chatham Alignment. He can do anything with any diesel. He looked at my project cars and said, "Shit can them," and walked away. Although he was watching our biodiesel progress with mild curiosity at the time, his idea of a good time is to load a cement mixer with gravel, drop it on a car, and then figure out how to get it off again without hurting anybody.

He has put a lot of energy into our tank truck, and he has saved Tami's Jetta on more than one occasion, and the Dodge as well, but when it came to restoring a late model Mercedes he basically invited me to jump in the very same lake that he generally tows wrecks out of.

So I tried a group of folks in Bear Creek. They were enthusiastic, claimed to know diesels, and claimed they could help me out. They didn't. Rather, they returned my non-working "Creampuffs" in markedly worse shape than I delivered them in.

I tried to interest the Bus Farm crowd, but although they are mechanical geniuses, they had trouble getting compression on a diesel once, and swore off diesels for life.

Enter Diaz. I don't even know his first name. He is a colorful Brazilian who Rachel used to work for, who initially took no interest in our biodiesel fantasies.

One night early in the project, I bumped into him at the Pitt Stop, a local racecar restaurant, and I was excited about the prospects of buying the Dodge. He waived me off.

"I hate diesels," he said. "I sold all my diesel tools, and I don't work on diesels anymore," was his curmudgeonly answer.

We have been trying to interest the skilled diesel mechanics in this community from the get go, including Rachel's recruitment of Johnny, who now runs the Diesel Technology Program down at the College and who sold me the Silver Ghost. Unlike the others, Johnny is an import who understood biofuels from the get go. He routinely whacks dysfunctional starters at just the right place, and helps people pull injection pumps, and offers support to those who are converting to straight vegetable oil.

Rachel set the hook in Diaz. She understood that his passion was creating masterpieces out of cars, and so we went to him with a concept that doesn't normally exist in nature: make a diesel convertible.

I called it Operation Creampuff to keep it a secret from Tami, which failed dismally in this small town. The idea was to rip the gasoline engine out of a convertible and replace it with a diesel.

He dove in headlong. He found a Mercedes 380 SL on Ebay in Maryland, found a home for its working motor (I think it went to Billy and Kathie's 380 SL that had a blown head gasket and now belongs to Diaz's son?)

He found a diesel motor that would barely fit, and went to work. It needed a custom transmission mount, a custom drive shaft, some modified gauges on the dash, and a whole bunch of engineering.

I stopped in to check on things from time to time, and Diaz appeared to be relishing the project. The car became like a child to him, and I have to say that my "love of cars" may have moved up a notch as the project progressed.

One of the standard questions we get in biodiesel is "What do I have to do to convert my engine?" We always reply "nothing," until we figure out that the caller has a gasoline vehicle, at which point we try to convince them not to replace their gasoline engine with a diesel. I even talked Forrest out of doing that back in the day.

And here I am. Driving around in a car that should not exist. With a "converted" engine. Here I am, pushing a gateway drug. If I "couldn't care less," how do I explain the ear to ear grin whenever I am driving Creampuff?

I can't wait until Triangle Clean Cities calls, as they sometimes do, looking for "a biodiesel vehicle" to park in front of the MacKimmon Center for their next energy conference. Instead of running Tami's Jetta through the carwash, we might run Creampuff to Raleigh instead.

Oh. And the ownership? That's unclear at this point. Since it was not really given to Tami for her 40th birthday, one could argue that it is still my car. She seems to believe it is hers. Next week Evan and I are jumping into Creampuff and heading to Florida for a book tour/coop conversation.

I'm thinking some folks down there will be way more interested in the car than in what we have to say-but I suppose drugs are like that.

Posted by Lyle at December 30, 2005 09:17 PM