Sliding Home: A Near Perfect Primer on SVO.

"Sliding Home: A Complete Guide to Driving Your Diesel on Straight Vegetable Oil" by Ray Holan is perhaps the best $30 a prospective SVO-WVO-vegoil driver can spend.

It is over 300 pages of humorous easy-to-read vegoil information. I've read it cover-to-cover, twice.

Starting with Ray's (and his wife's) personal story of how he came to SVO - through a love of cars, renewable energy and biodiesel-related explosions; and continuing to walkthroughs of actual installations - it's an informative, enjoyable read.

It covers all the major kit companies, and a number of the smaller ones. It gives a short history of Dr. Diesel and his engines, and goes over the wide selection of diesels available in the North American market.

If you want to save your time and sanity and avoid wading through the myriad of internet opinions, this is the introductory book you need to read.

It is not a technical manual. Non-mechanics will love it for explaining how to run vegoil while avoiding jargon.

However, if you're looking for the technical aspects of vegoil and your fuel injection system, you should head straight for "The Edge of Veg" by Stephen Helbig, the only other SVO-centric book.

My only critique of "Sliding Home" is that it's a nice book, perhaps a bit too nice. It details all the kits and vehicles available, but leaves it up to you to choose the best one. At 300 plus pages, however, this is a small issue. Another issue, not really a critique, is the fact that it's a book. Great to read, but not necessarily the latest cutting edge information. It's not the book to design or install your system by. It's the book to understand all the craziness you're reading on the internet - the near perfect primer.

And, if you want opinions on the best kit or the easiest car to convert, just check out the Vegwerks Blog!

Veg On!