The Great Pumpkin Rides Again!
After weeks of engine swapping, tweaking, scrambling for parts, plugging leaks, and general trouble shooting, the Orange Rover, AKA The Great Pumpkin, is finally on the road again. Terry and I went for a little spin around the neighborhood, then I headed over the hill to the hardware store. Yeah 
The Great Pumpkin Rides Again!
Tip: Click play, then pause for a sec to let it buffer a little, then play again. Otherwise it’ll play a little choppy the first time.
Thanks to Dave and Michelle for all their help getting this thing going!
Tags: St. Croix
December 10th, 2007 at 7:24 am
It sounds and looks great!
December 10th, 2007 at 8:15 am
Hehe, that is cute
March 24th, 2008 at 2:57 am
I didn’t realize you actually have one of those runnin’ now. That’s great! I’m sooo jealous. I baddly want a diesel SUV. I’d really like a Mercedes G-Wagen, but that probably won’t happen, at least not for quite a while.
March 24th, 2008 at 11:12 am
Actually, we’ve had “one” of those running (both have been running, just not at the same time) since April of last year. We’ve been running them (whichever happens to be running) on a blend of 50/50 dino-diesel and veggie oil since July of last year.
Sadly, today, neither is running. The green one has been out-of-commission since December. It has a major crack in the front right chassis. I have all the replacement parts to weld a new section of chassis in, but haven’t had the opportunity to take the front end apart to do it. Meanwhile, we “borrowed” the alternator and battery from it to get the Great Pumpkin running in December. I now have a new alternator to put back in it, but we seem to be having issues with batteries.
The Great Pumpkin started having starting issues a few weeks ago. When I turn the key, sometimes the starter turns over, sometimes not, but it would eventually start after 1 to 5 tries. Last Thursday night, the starter refused to turn over, even after copious pleading and multiple turns of the key. We happen to have a spare starter/solenoid unit from the blue junker. So I swapped them out yesterday. Same problem, solenoid clicks, but no start. So I checked all the connections, again, hooked a charger to the battery, tightened the alternator belt, it seemed a little loose, so we thought maybe the battery was a bit low. Still nothing. Charged another battery over-night, just in case, but it seems to be toast. It appears now that maybe the problem is all in the batteries, but I’ve run out of spares. The one from the green rover is only a year old, but maybe it has issues. The one originally from the Great Pumpkin doesn’t seem to be holding much of any charge. Hopefully, its all batteries, H&H will replace the lemon they sold us last year (36 mo warrantee), and we can move on.
BTW, some folks drove through here (yep, they drove through the Virgin Islands, as part of their ’round the world drive) a couple weeks ago. They were driving a G-wagon, probably a diesel, though the article here didn’t mention it, but it was an ’88 Benz 300GD (I’m assuming, based on Mercedes usual lettering system, that the D is for diesel).
July 28th, 2008 at 2:47 pm
Isn’t this vehicle a little bit of a gas guzzling smogger for someone who is so keen on the environment?
July 28th, 2008 at 3:07 pm
Actually Kent, its a veggie guzzling low-smogger (soon to be no-smogger). If you’d read through the posts on this you’d know we were running it on veggie oil. Its currently running on 50% veggie oil (recyled) and 50% low surfur diesel. Eventually it will be running on nearly 100% recycled veggie oil, in one form or another.
I’d say it probably uses less petroleum and puts out less pollutants than whatever you’re driving. And, its nearly 50 years old, how many vehicles have gone through their whole life cycle and ended up in the landfill while this one has been on the road? How many resources, both material and energy, were used in the production and subsequent destruction of those vehicles?
August 4th, 2008 at 7:08 pm
I stand corrected! I should have read more carefully. It would be nice if we could run all our vehicles on veggie oil, but alas, we all have to eat and if we converted all our vehicles to veggie oil, there wouldn’t be anywhere to grow food…just oil producing plants.
It is clear that we have to do something about our need for oil. I don’t know what it will be, but it is definitely a long way off, there really isn’t even anything on the drawing board that will realistically replace our need for oil. What we should do is find as much as we can in our own country while we try to find other sources of energy to power our cars, trucks, trains, ships, planes, tractors, power plants, etc.
The problem right now is that no one wants any of the alternatives in their backyard. I can imagine the uproar if someone wanted to put a couple of huge windmill farms on St. Croix and/or in the waters surrounding it! Or, if everyone had their own windmills and huge solar panels…now that would be beautiful!
Well anyway…keep up the good work with the Rover. I saw a news story about a guy around here running his old Mercedes on veggie oil. He spends most of his time looking for oil and then filtering it for use.
By the way…my wife and I both work out of our home so we put almost no miles on our cars each year. If most of the country worked that way imagine the oil that would be saved with no commuting! What about 4 day work weeks?
August 5th, 2008 at 11:31 am
Thanks for wanting to discuss the issue, Kent.
The oil we use has already been used. Friends who own restaurants need to get rid of fryer oil, so we’ve collected some and are recycling it in our Rover. A lot of it ends up in the landfill anyway. We can’t take it all, unfortunately.
Biodiesel is being produced more and more throughout the world, some using recycled oil, some fresh oil. There are many innovative ideas out there leading, we hope to non-dependence on non-renewable resources (fossil fuels).
You say, “The problem right now is that no one wants any of the alternatives in their backyard. I can imagine the uproar if someone wanted to put a couple of huge windmill farms on St. Croix and/or in the waters surrounding it! Or, if everyone had their own windmills and huge solar panels…now that would be beautiful!”
My response is – Not only do we want alternatives in our back yard we want them on our houses. What uproar? The uproar now is about the ridiculous WAPA rates. People are really looking for a better way. I listen to radio talk shows and hear the local people talking about what matters to them.
I kind of resent your assumptions. You don’t live here, and you don’t know what it’s like to live here.
Our blog is here to give readers one of many residential perspectives. We have lived here for many years, doing our own thing, but also observing many other things. Certain things frustrate us about being here, but they are part of livin’ on St. Croix and we enjoy open-minded dialog about them.
It’s nice that you work from your home. Have you contacted your congressional representatives to suggest the 4 day work week?
August 5th, 2008 at 2:06 pm
I do contact my representatives all the time about all kinds of issues. I encourage debate whenever I can.
It is nice that you are using recycled veggie oil for your vehicle. That is a nice hobby. I recently read that if all the veggie oil used in the US each year were recycled and used for fuel, it would only account for .07% of the total fuel used each year. Not much of an alternative fuel source. In addition, veggie fuel does have it’s harmful emissions, although different ones than fossil fuels.
I must say that I resent the all to prevalent attitude by many who live “full time” on St. Croix that if you are not a full time resident, you don’t know what you are talking about when it comes to affairs of the island. I don’t appreciate your assumption that I don’t know what is going on there and that I am not involved because I don’t live “full time” there. I have lived on the island through tropical storms and hurricanes and lived using generator power for days at a time. I recently authorized the use of land I own in Cane Bay so the Police can place a mobile police station there in an effort to fight crime in the area. I am a member of the St. Croix Chamber of Commerce and the St. Croix Hotel and Tourism Association. Are you? Need I go on? Just because I am not a “full time” resident doesn’t mean I am not involved or aware of what life on the island means. I read 2 online St. Croix news papers each day and listen to St. Croix radio online…I don’t need to be there “full time” to do that.
I have been coming to St. Croix, and have owned two villas and a condo there for over 10 years now. I spend a great deal of time on the island and have a lot of experience living on St. Croix. In fact, I probably have to deal with many issues that you never have to. I have made friends with many “full time” and I am pretty confident that the vast majority of St. Croix’s residents would not like every house on the island having it’s own wind turbine in the yard, nor would they want a commercial wind farm in their back yard. Have you ever seen a commercial wind farm first hand? The towers are hundreds of feet tall, the blades themselves are 90-100 ft. long and farm itself covers hundreds, if not thousands of acres.
It is not economically feasible for the average person to pay for, or to have a wind turbine on their property. This is taken from the California Energy Commission’s website: “A typical 10 kilowatt home wind turbine system will cost $25,000 – $35,000 to install. If placed in windy areas, it will produce between 10,000 to 18,000 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year. Such a turbine has a blade diameter of about 20-25 feet and needs to sit on a tower about 100 feet tall. Homes sitting on a one-acre parcel could probably accommodate such a turbine, depending on local zoning restrictions”.
Where exactly would a wind farm large enough to power the island go? It would have to be close to shore, the water is too deep around St. Croix otherwise, or on land somewhere on the island. I guess a good spot would be where Golden wants to put his resort?
Believe me, I am fully aware of the ridiculous cost of electricity on the island. I just got an $1,857 electric bill for one month at one of my villas, and that property was only occupied for 3 weeks of the billing period!
I would be perfectly happy to have a small Nuke plant power the island. If a country like France can have 80% of its power from nuke plants, why can’t we?
May 21st, 2011 at 2:54 pm
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