It started with a phone call. Vincenzo, our fearless leader over at the Dewey truck, was in his second week working with us full time.
“Ayr, what kind of fuel does the truck take?”
At first I was confused. The Vincenzo added “Unleaded, right?”
And something about his tone told me exactly what had happened. “Oh s#@$! Turn the engine off immediately!” Then phone calls, etc. The mechanic: “Oh s@#$!”, my wife “Oh s@#$!”
a bunch more after the break…It turns out he hadn’t started the engine, which is a good thing. But he had loaded the truck with about 30 gallons of unleaded gasoline. This is a diesel truck. Remember our whole aspiration to run the trucks on fry oil, etc? Enzo tried to figure it out, then his phone died, and he left the truck at the gas station (this is around 7pm). Nobody would work on it without towing, and you can just imagine what towing our food truck would be like. Not fun.
Chris and I came out to the truck, found it sitting there. I talked to our friends at Brookline Ice and Coal and they provided me with a 50 gallon drum. Chris and I went down to Autozone and bought a siphon kit. We tried to get the hose in the tank but it couldn’t navigate the turns in the neck. Chris had this ingenious idea to put a wire on the end of the hose, but we didn’t have a wire. So we improvised:
This worked perfectly, the hose went right into the unleaded sitting in the diesel tank. We got the siphon going and 3 hours later had a 50 gallon drum filled with unleaded/diesel mix. Vincenzo stuck it out through the end of the night, a little after midnight, and helped me put the truck away.
On the upside, Vincenzo taught us how to order a killer pizza at a bad pizza joint. We were hungry with all of this oil moving. He ordered a white pizza with garlic and broccoli. I wouldn’t have had any idea this would work, but it was awesome, really really good. And the pizza place it came from was really really bad.
