I can make stuff hot again

So in my experiments with waste oil burning I have reached a new milestone. On Friday night I managed to make something hot using waste oil and compressed air alone.

I can also still break hammers. I think I trimmed too much off when I fitted the head on last time so it has just slid over the taper the wedges put in the wood. I have a few plans on how to fix this so it doesn't happen again. I'll be bringing you along for my experimentation there as well.

It took me a little while to get the fire going this good. To start with what I was trying was dripping the oil into a stream of air from my shop-vac on blow, atomizing(?) it then carrying it through into a fire that I'd already lit to get some heat into the fireplace. Unfortunately that didn't work.

I had some charcoal in the bottom of the fire to help get a decent bed of hot ashes to be spraying the oil onto. Unfortunately with any kind of draft, even from the hairdryer. The charcoal turned into embers which were getting picked up by the wind a little and heading towards the neighbors yards. Not so good.

The next thing I tried was to just jamb the nozzle from my previous test(here) through a gap in the bricks and backfill with dirt. Unfortunately I forgot to take a photo of that as well.

This was the result:

A nice big ball of flame, with relatively few sparks as there is much less air moving. I put a spring in the fire as this is something I have been toying with a bit recently and it did get hot.

It did take a fir while so there is plenty of room to improve but a good proof of concept. It will burn when feeding into a smallish, pre-heated chamber.

Here I was deliberately running rich to get the big fat flame to come out of the fireplace and shed some light on the surrounding area so I could see what I'm doing.

It's impressive the amount of control I have over this, for a pretty crude piece of engineering.

After I turned off the burner this is what it looked like inside the fireplace. I put some bricks on top as it was spitting a little and I was hoping to stop the bricks surrounding the fireplace from cooling too quick and cracking. The glow is what's left of the fire I was using to get everything started, scraps of wood and charcoal mainly.

This is what was left a few days later. The burner is over on the left and can't quite be seen.

I took a little video of this and I will share that as soon as I have it edited together. I am going to play with this fireplace as it is for a while and see if I can get a bit more heat out of it, then I have a small gas bottle that will probably become my new forge. I will probably be lining that with some kind of fireproof material to help stop the steel from burning out.

Cheers,
Rex

I've discovered fire!!

That's right, with compressed air, waste oil and a blowtorch I have made fire at home.
Starting with this beast of a thing on the right:

And a bunch of fittings:

And some Pipe:

I managed to make an oil burner. I put an outlet in the bottom of the tank, blocked off one of the ports and put a T-piece on one of the other ports so I could let air into the tank.

I put the air in through a regulator I got from the hardware store. I'm not sure if it's because it was a cheap one, or it's designed to operate at higher pressure, or the setup was just wrong but I found that by clamping down on the plastic air hose going to the nozzle I could get the burner to run reliably. I had put a needle valve in the fuel flow so I had control of air and fuel. But I think the control of air was still too coarse. Before next weekend I will get another needle valve for the air and use that to control it, rather than a set of multi-grips:

While setting this up I did manage to tidy things up with a bit of cotton twine and parceled the fuel and air hoses together a bit to help control the tangle before reaching the mixer.

Hopefully this weekend I will get some more fittings and then will be able to get a video of this beast of a thing running. I used the blowtorch we saw here to light up the burner, but I had to keep it on hand as it was very prone to flameout which I think was because there was too much air coming through because the fuel is too viscous at the cooler winter temperatures.

Now that it is starting to cool down I have got some Metho for lighting up this burner. Unfortunately I haven't quite got the amount that I need right so starting it gets a little exciting. If anyone is interested I will do a video of me setting it on fire. Erm, lighting it...

Anyway that's all for tonight

Cheers,

Rex

I'm not trying to start a collection.

Honest...
It might be better if you stop here Mum.

So these followed me home from the Junktion on the weekend. 2 x 40L Air compressors with solid tanks. One of the compressor heads seems to be seized up but it doesn't have a fan on it so that could just be a lack of leverage. The other one can be spun by hand and makes the right sort of whooshing noises so I think it works.

Unfortunately neither of them have any regulators or power plugs on them so I will need to buy some, probably off eBay or AliExpress.

The plan for these is to turn one into an extra resevoir to increase the capacity of my compressor from 20L to 60L. And if I get an extra compressor head or 2 out of it, all the better.
The other one will be turned into a fuel tank for an oil burner I am planning on building for the forge. Similar to the one in this video:


I'm planning on getting that done in the next few weeks or so.

So keep an eye out for an improved forge in the coming months.

Cheers,
Rex

Meting Plastic Time

Remember a couple of days ago when I shared how to clean a can easily for an upcoming project I had here? Well here is the project.

For a project that my brother has on the go he asked if I'd be able to make a rot resistant, durable block with a bit of give. I've seen and heard of people melting down various plastics to make things and I figured that would do. After all that is what many 3D printers use as their media.

For the source stock I am using recycled HDPE from various containers that would just get thrown in the recycle bin anyway.

I cut them just enough to be able to fit in, It would probably be better if I'd made the pieces smaller though.

For a heat source I just used the grill on the barbeque. You can see where all the fat has burned off here from heating various tings without cooking. I need to replace the heat beads so that I can cook over a more even heat because really the bit in the middle gets burnt and the edges stay a bit raw. Not so nice.

This is where I finished off, I only had the one container to melt down and they take up a lot less space then I thought they would. So I will have to collect somewhat more material before I finish this off.
You can see the label in there. If you've read my previous post about the can then you will understand how lazy I can be. If I didn't need to take the label off then I wasn't going to. Looks like I probably should've though.

I've had some suggestions on how to more accurately control the heat without having to be as worried about setting the HDPE on fire so I'll give that a go once I have some more feed stock.

Cheers,
Rex

How to clean a can out

Those who know me will agree that I'm lazy, very lazy. If there is an easy way to do something I will do my best to find it. So when I had in mind a project that needed a smallish metal container I went looking for the easiest thing I could find.

A tin can will serve nicely for what I have coming up and many other projects in the future. But how to clean it without taking too much effort? Here's what I came up with:

If you look closely you can see I put it in a little fire I lit to burn off some of the tree trimmings from our yard. I got impatient so I pulled out the can rather than just letting the fire burn out. This is what  I had left:

It is a little blackened and charred, but a light coating of carbon may actually help with what I have in mind. But if I needed to I could probably clean up the can with a wire brush or some sand paper. But I don't need it clean and I am lazy so it will stay dirty.

So there you have it. If you need a tin can for a project and don't want to spend too much time cleaning it all you need is a fire and the work will be basically done for you.

Cheers,
Rex