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[Swamp Donkey]

Let me start by saying that I fully support the use of any all alternative fuels, whether its WVO, soy-diesel or bio-diesel, and regardless of whether its store-bought or home-mabe and I do not believe that their use poses any risk whatsoever to the injectors or engine. The problem here is not the WVO, its what was in the WVO.

We got a set of injectors in yesterday for repair. The customer has been running a 50/50 mix of WVO and pump diesel for some time now and said that one injector went out about 3 weeks ago, and then two more last week, so he parked the truck and called us. The engine has around 250,000 miles, so the injectors show the normal wear from that, but what we found when we disassembled them was beyond belief.
All the parts of the injector that are in contact with the fuel: the nozzle body, piston & spring, plunger and barrel, fuel metering plates and the nozzle assembly look like they have been sand blasted, there is so much metal eaten away.

There was some sort of extremely caustic or acidic agent in some of the WVO that has eaten several thousandths of an inch off all of the parts that contact the fuel in just a few days, or a week at the most.
Understand that most of these parts are made to tolerances of one ten-thausandth or even just a few hundred-thousandths of an inch, so losing several thousandth of an inch means that most of the injector is completely destroyed. Also, they are made out of very high grade, hardened tool steel, so we're not talking about some cheap pot metal getting eaten up by some Spic and Span or some Fantastic or Lysol. I'm guessing that the restaurant cleaned out the fryalators with a major dose of caustic soda or equivalent--but this damage is after mixing with 10-20 gallons of oil and then diluting it further with 50% diesel!
I've seen many injectors with water damage, 2 sets with gasoline damage, and several sets out of burned engines, but this set is 10 times worse than any of these--they may not be rebuildable--and even then it may be cheaper for the customer to purchase 8 brand new alliant power injectors at $225 + tax apiece.
I was able to get a small sample of fuel from one of the injectors and hope to get some Ph test strips Wednesday to find out at least whether it was alkaline or acidic, but in light of what its going to cost to repair these injectors I highly recommend that everyone who is running WVO get a Ph test kit and test every batch they use.
Finally, the customer was triple-filtering the fuel before it ever got to the injectors, so this is not something that you can filter out.

Be careful guys!