Anybody know more about that?
You can convert it to run vegetable oil, but especially in colder climates you'll find out how much of a pain it is, and it still requires *some* diesel. You flip a switch to use the petrodiesel for a minute or two to warm things up, at which point the vegetable oil becomes liquid again, then you can switch over. Even then, it's hell on the engine, really gums things up. You'd want to go back to community college and learn to service diesel engines.
A better strategy for someone striving to become self-sufficient would be to go buy your real estate somewhere that you could grow an acre of an oil crop. Stuff like sunflowers can yield up to 120 gallons per acre. A small press to turn it into the oil... now, I know what you're thinking, isn't that just vegetable oil? Well, if I were buying real estate, I'd be looking for it somewhere that I had access to salt. There's this one place in Texas, Estelline Springs where salt water just bubbles out of the ground. So much that in the 1960s the Army Corps of Engineers blocked it off so the saltwater wasn't ruining the Brazos river. But it's still there, and if I could own that property, damn would that be nice. Not only salt for culinary uses, but there's a simple enough machine one could build that you could turn that saltwater into several different substances. Bleach, for one. Hydrogen gas for another (bottle it up for other chemistry projects). But most of all, just plain old soda lye.
With vegetable oil and lye, you need just one more ingredient to make a proper diesel fuel. Alcohol. Ethanol will work (but you have to get it to 100%, which if you know anything at all about distillation, is basically impossible). Methanol works best, but it's fucking poisonous to work with, and I don't trust myself to not fuck that up. Also basically impossible to make. Butanol though is an interesting one. There's this microbe (you can buy samples of it online too, for $20) that ferments the stuff. If you could learn to grow this bug (C. acetobutylicum) you'd get about 2% butanol. Not alot, so you'd need to set up a continuous distillation column (as you reduce the level of butanol in the bioreactor, the microbe makes more, it just can't tolerate anything above 2%ish). And you only need about 3/4s of a gallon for every 10 gallons of vegetable oil. Nevermind that it's a useful fuel in its own right.
Best of all, at the same time you're fermenting butanol, you're getting about half as much acetone. Acetone plus the bleach (above) and you can make chloroform which is a dangerous but serviceable general anesthetic. Acetone and chloroform are also solvents that one could use to extract natural rubber from plant material (dandelion, goldenrod, a hundred other species). But for sulfur, you'd be on your way to being able to make useful quantities of natural rubber. Not enough for tires, but maybe for machinery belts. Gaskets for canning, etc.
For someone still stuck in the suburbs you could try doing this shit for a diesel vehicle. But you're going to find all the food gone off shelves including vegetable oil. And last I noticed at the grocery store, they already want $16/gal for any of the good stuff, meaning the shit soybean oil is what, above $10? Maybe lye and methanol would be available though, so it could be worth reading up on it.
Charcoal briquettes are treated with a lot of chemicals that you would NOT want to filter your water or have near your face as a filter, so do not use those for any DIY filtration process. You can buy activated charcoal in bulk to create your filtration system or augment a commercial one when the filters start going out.
