Saturday and Sunday at:

 

Saturday, August 28th, 2001, 6:00 AM. Yes, that's right I got to "sleep in" this morning. The night's rest was pretty good, considering that the last time I slept in a tent was probably when I was in Boy Scouts. As usual when away from home, I was wearing ear plugs while I slept, so it was the morning light which awakened me.

Ate some breakfast granola and made a cup of coffee on the portable stove, as I don't know when the espresso trailer opens this morning, and I need to turn on the lights inside my head. The thing about running on sleep deprivation and caffeine is that I have a lot of energy, but also a zoned-out feeling which will eventually catch up with me.

SolWest is hosted at the Grant County Fairgrounds, just a couple of blocks away from Main Street in John Day. The Orchard, which is where the tent camping is located, is to the north of the grounds, and is also the area under the KJDY-AM transmission tower. To the south are the stock barns and classrooms where many of the presentations and lectures are held, then the Pavillion building, which houses some of the displays and the fair office. Outside to the east is the general vendor's area, with displays of wind machines, solar panels, water pumping equipment, and my EV and pusher combo.

Arrived at the car to find that the circuit breaker on the service panel had tripped with 18 ampere-hours still to charge, so I reset the breaker to finish the charge. Darren arrived with a 10 by 10 foot pop-up canopy, which we set up over the rear of the car and front of the trailer. I scored a folding table from behind the Home Power booth and taped some printed sheets of descriptive material about the car and trailer to the top and put out a stack of my "business" cards with the web address on them. Open for Business!

 

(Neither of these guys is me!)

 

Borrowed a Seimens SP-70 photovoltaic panel from Bob at Energy Outfitters, and using some wire donated by another booth, I hooked it up to recharge the battery under the hood of the pusher.

I had expected that there would be some interest in my homemade hybrid, but the response was pretty astounding. From the time I arrived at the car about 7 AM until I finally broke away about 7 PM, there was a constant stream of visitors, both public and fellow exhibitors, coming by to ask about the trailer and car. I put the trailer first, as the EV seemed to inspire less interest than the pusher.

About halfway through the day, I realized that the non-stop talking was going to deep-six my throat, so I tried to conserve my voice, and talk from the diaphragm. This helped some, and I made it a point to drink a lot of the bottled water that I had purposely brought along to beat the high country heat.

Of course, the questions about the pusher were quite predictable, "What does it do?" and "What is that drill for?" and "Doesn't it get out of control with that single-point hitch?", and all of the rest. After a while, I decided to have some fun with it and would make some of the viewers draw their own conclusions, then follow up with the correct information. This also helped conserve my voice, as there would be perhaps ten or fifteen people drawing conclusions and figuring out the system, and passing the knowledge along to others who had just walked up.

Somewhere during the afternoon, I got away for a few minutes to have a baked potato and visit with other friends who had exhibits. The solar panel that I had borrowed had recharged the pusher battery, so I disconnected it and returned it to be stowed away with the other merchandise at the end of the day.

Dropped over to the Home Power booth to see what Richard Perez had in mind for dinner, but was disappointed to find that he and the HP crew were heading for a heavy-duty steak house, which didn't appeal to my vegetarian tastes at all. Instead, I ordered a garden burger at one of the food concessions on site, then took it over to Darren's motel room to nosh along with some good beer before doing the shower thing.

Afterwards, we had planned on going over to Canyon City to take part in the "Music in the Park" event, which is when the entire town turns out for a festival in the town square. Unfortunately, when I unhooked the trailer and started the EV to drive the two miles from John Day to Canyon City, I found that the controller had blown a transistor, and the motor would only idle, I had no accelerator action. This is the second time this has happened, but never so far from home and repair parts.

About the time that I arrived back at the Motel to tell Darren that we would need to take his car to Canyon City, we saw the HP crew returning from dinner. Stopped by their swank motel suite (they get the multi-bedroom apartment at the Dreamers Inn) to inquire about the possibility that they would know where I could pick up a replacement component to repair the car in the morning. They didn't, and we ended up staying for a chat, drinking a little bit more beer, smoking cigarettes, and swapping stories.

The little party broke up about 10:30 or so, and I went back to The Orchard and my tent to go to bed at an actually reasonable hour for a change.

Sunday, July 29th. The day dawned partly cloudy, with the smell of rain in the air. Did the usual morning routine, breakfast, coffee, etc., and wandered over to the car and trailer. Today I resolved to spend a bit more time checking out the other exhibitor's wares and take in Dave's Biodiesel lecture.

At 11:00 AM, the Electrathon race began in the fairgrounds parking lot. About 20 cars started the circuit, which ran out of the main gates and looped around one square block of the adjoining residential neighborhood. Last year, the track was fully contained within the parking lot, and the tightness of the turns was really hard on tires and wheels, producing many blowouts.

Also during the 2000 SolWest fair, the Home Power crew was bitten by the Electrathon racing bug, and vowed to have their own racing team and cars this year. The two high-tech cars that Richard Perez commissioned weren't quite race-ready, so one was displayed at the Home Power booth, but not entered in the competition.

Before the race ended, I had to leave to join the Biodiesel lecture. David had brought a small trailer which had been reconstructed into a complete Biodiesel lab, capable of producing 12 gallons of fuel per batch. The first half of the lecture was some background on vegetable oil fuels, and very basic concepts of diesel engine operation. I had a pretty good handle on these, having read up on the fuel and torn my engine to a bare block and back to running condition. What I didn't know is that Rudolph Diesel got the idea for the diesel engine combustion by watching African natives kindle fires by igniting combustible materials by heating them inside telescoping wooden logs, the compression of the air causing the temperature to rise to a very high degree.

The second half of Dave's talk was a demonstration of the actual making of Biodiesel fuel as a "blender batch", literally made in a kitchen blender using virgin oil, isopropyl alcohol and store-bought drain opener. Although the reaction and settling of the fuel takes about eight hours, after only five minutes there was a noticeable separation of fuel from the rest of the mixture in the blender top.

There had been an intense interest in Biodiesel fuel all during the fair, and Saturday, I had been offered a fill up with fuel by two people, Jacques, who had come from Corvallis, Oregon in a Biodiesel-fueled VW Rabbit with a 15 gallon barrel of fuel in his back seat, and Nick, who was hauling a 55 gallon drum of commercially-made Biodiesel in the back of his diesel pickup. Now I had to decide who to accept a refill from. Nick was leaving, and had driven his truck onto the fairgrounds to get close enough to reach the filler on the pusher, scattering fair attendees in the process. I apologized to Jacques, as I didn't want him to be disappointed that I didn't take him up on his offer of fuel. As it turned out, Jacques was later to play a much more important role in this trip.

 

(Left-to-right) Unknown fair attendee. Jacques, manning the filler hose. Mike and
Shorty, who travel in a Biodiesel-powered school bus conversion. Nick, pumping
the fuel in the truck bed. Bob Maynard of Energy Outfitters' elbow.

 

About 3:30 PM, the clouds let go with a few showers, and all of the exhibitors made haste to pack up their wares and get under cover. I collapsed the canopy before it got wet and we stuffed it into Darren's car. Since I had no interest in sleeping in a soggy tent, I drove the car and trailer back to the Orchard and threw all of my gear into the car, took down the tent, and drove into one of the stock barns to set up camp under a secure roof. Jacques thought this was a pretty good idea, so he joined me with his car and tent. The rain held off for several more hours, so we were able to spend a bit of time socializing with the remaining members of the fair, as most everyone else had packed up and hit the road. Jennifer Barker, the SolWest organizer, had six or eight pizzas delivered, and there was a couple of kegs of beer left from some party earlier, so we sat around in the campground "bar" and ate and drank a bit.

Richard Perez came by and I gave him the tour of the pusher in the stock barn. He requested a 2,500 word article for an upcoming issue of Home Power.

Bedded down to the sound of light sprinkles on the tin roof, secure in the knowledge that I would awake to a fairly dry tent and bedding.

 

2 tents, 2½ Rabbits, and a bicycle

 

See what happens tomorrow (Monday)