I need to give kudos to a bloke called Ozzirt (I think he might be Irish) as permutations of his drip-feed, no-fan, no visible emissions, no smoke inside burners are all over the world and all over YouTube

Principle is simple, as stated.  If you have a bit of steel/iron/metal that's close to red-hot and if you drip oil onto it - then the oil will vapourise.  If you have a flame there and a just-right draft, the oil fumes will burn like bloody wildfire - and burn hot and clean by the look of things

The secret to it seems to be creating a good draft - using a long flue, basically - and using that draft to suck controlled amounts of air into the thing so that there's a good fire keeping the drip-plate-thingie hot, and a bunch of secondary-burn air-holes at strategic spots to get a raging column of burning oil fumes heating up a big metal something on their way to the flue.  The big metal something - the "stove" bit  (designs vary from a bit of heavy pipe to 100-litre compressed-air receivers - and everything in between)  radiates heat into whatever area.

Temperatures seem to be in the range of 900-1000 degrees F at the top of the burner pot area and maybe 400-700 F at various parts of the big heat-radiating "stove" bit

There are as many design schools as there are builders, and different versions of secondary air feeds abound - but there's a lot of overlap

So over the recent couple of weeks while my perk-disliking boss has been "working from home" I have come into the shop at six every morning and gotten in 90 mins work building myself one of these before anyone else turns up

The Domestic Authority isn't keen to be tripping over big bits of pipe shit in the garage  (and who can blame her) so the bits are sitting on a pallet out in the paddock in the traditional "under the Macrocapa Trees" site

Because they're out in the weather I gave them a coat of zinc primer and a coat of black enamel (which will burn off and stink/smoke like buggery hen it's fired).  I wish I had photographed it before painting - but too late now.  The black makes it hard to see detail

Anyway - pics attached

Main features are:

Body ex 250mm NB pipe with 8mm wall and 12mm top plate and 6mm wall 125mm swept elbow bend to flue cos there was one in the workdhop.  Crude baffles in the body to hopefully extract some heat before it goes up the flue

At the junction of the top of the burner tube/bottom of the body, there's an up-angled 40mm air intake with a section of 40mm pipe and a brass gate valve (the 600mm of pipe is just to keep the gate valve away from the hot stuff) so I can have a tinker with a tertiary air intake if it's good or just plug it with a 40mm BSP bung if it ain't

There's a funny stub-and-flange sticking out the other side.  That's cos I need to mount it out in the paddock miles from anything flammable and I have a post with a suitable flange for that to mate to in a suitable location.  So it'll be kinda "free-standing" so as to be easy to muck about with

Hanging below the body is a section of 100mm SC40 steel pipe with a bunch of holes (secondary burn section).  I figure I may have to drill more holes but I figured drilling extra ones later was easier (out int he paddock) than welding up surplus ones later.  On the bottom of that there's a flange where the burn chamber/pot bolts to the underside of it - just 4 X M16 bolts atm cos I don't want to do one of the many quick-release designs in the development stages in case it self-releases and sprays burning shit everywhere

On the top of that flange there are welded 3 X 15mm sockets (temporarily blocked with 3 X 15mm steel bungs so I can have one, two or three primary air holes

There's a bunch of 15mm/20mm plumbing to facilitate dripping one or two sources of oil into the pot (I don't like the copper-pipe-flapping-around look) an I have valving and plumbing etc "ready to roll"

It's a prototype.  I guess it owes me 10/15 hours and zero $$

Hopefully I'll get to do some burns with it in the next few months - firstly to validate/disprove/fine-tune the design; secondly to have a play with the heavy oil of which I have a potentially almost limitless supply

We'll see what happens.  As always, there is much to learn

Here at work we generate several tonnes of waste oil each year.  This year I would like to harvest some of it

One of these days I'd like to have an oil-burning drip-feed heater (and yes, I think I'm cogniscent of the pitfalls/problems around how temp changes viscosity, how they can't be left to run unattended etc etc) because I think my circumstances will suit one AND I have, potentially, a LOT of oil

I made a prototype a while back and have just about finished building Mk11 at work with some options to control primary, secondary & tertiary air intakes - hope to do some trial burns when this Covid shit is over and life can resume

So today at work I welded in a 40mm BSP socket to the side of an empty 44-gallon (200 litre) drum about 150mm (six inches) above the bottom.  I'll use the air-pump oil-transfer thingie to fill it up next week at work

What I reckon/hope/wonder is this:

My observation is that the oil is pretty non-hygroscopic.  When I drain gearboxes first you get a stream of clear water, then a stream of clean oil.  You don't get any white stuff

So I'm hoping that if it sits in a drum for a few years, that any water and whatever "dirt" is in there (no combustion by-products are present) will simply "settle out" and if I write off the bottom six inches by just draining it down to the new bung on the side - I might end up with quite a "clean" product

It has been bothering me for years that we just throw this stuff away by giving it to the recyclers.  It seems to me it's potentially a resource I should be harvesting.  There's probably nothing to stop me welding a socket in a heap of drums and harvesting a tonne or two

I'd be interested in any thoughts from folks who are experienced in dealing with "waste" oils

Cheers

https://www.trademe.co.nz/Browse/Listing.aspx?id=2532087845

There might be some life left in the oily one?

https://www.trademe.co.nz/a.aspx?id=2362208006&member_hash=a3a7566550fad4bdc4224f94f4401662016de7c29f5cc5555c&tm=email&et=46&mt=3CD2EA5F-6EC8-4299-AE88-E417DDE97A03

Check out this little beauty

It looks as if it has been somebody's baby

Maybe a liquid-cooled single with a hopper above?  Looks kinda two-stroke-ish in the cylinder area

I wonder if anyone has built a welder powered by a CS or similar using a Lincoln Tractapak or Hummel or PTO-drive welder unit?

I dunno if 6HP would cut it - but these old girls have a surprising amount of torque and might manage, say, 150A?

I'd be interested in any thoughts.  Cheers

It's the Jetsons

Check it out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgdj9HpdzvI

I guess it's a bit of a toy in some ways (a piper cub will go three times as far on a tank of gas

But this little plane is travelling at 100MPH, is good for about 90-100 miles on a charge, cruises at 100MPH using just 20kW to do so

The plane cost $140K.  But the 100-mile flight used $5 of electricity (and yes, you could easily charge it with solar)

Some sort of a "shape of things to come" ?

Back in 2007 I was fortunate enough to spend a week at the Isle of Man TT

It was my 50th birthday present to my motorcycle-enthusiast self.  It was also the 100th running of the famous event - so it was a big party.  Back then my then GF and I were both freelance writer/photographers for various motor/motorcycle publications so it was a rare opportunity to see, photograph and write about something special

The racing was as spectacular as you might imagine.  It was the first year riders cracked the 130MPH lap average speed, and the weather was fine

But my favourite memory is the old guys from Honda who had come back 40 or50 years later with their old race bikes and their memories.

Almost without exception their stories went something like this:

When we first began to build motorcycles the British laughed at us and said "Let then make and sell little toy bikes; what do we care?"

Then, ten years later when we first arrived to compete at the Isle of man - they looked at our small motorcycles and sneered and laughed

When we got out onto the track and began to win races - the laughter stopped . . .

"This year (2007)" one of them said "you will not find a race here at the IOM - apart from specialist ones - where all three bikes on the podium are not Japanese"

Small beginnings . . .

OK so, see below.  This is a beginning and (like some of the early Japanese motorcycles) by God it's an ugly duckling of a car.  BUT, IMHO, I think it might be a sign of things to come

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSbWwn_YCr8

And, at the complete other end of the scale, hands up anyone who is familiar with the Goodwood Festival of Speed sprint?.. It's a BIG fish in a small pond

This year, an electric car knocked a couple of seconds (significant in a sub-40 second sprint event) off the record set 20 years ago by a McLaren F1 car which no-one (despite million-dollar attempts) had managed to ever beat

Check it out.  it won't take long to watch lol

And it's a VW - which says something about where the company is going.  Same car smashed the Pikes Peak hillclimb record last year and beat the previous electric car record at the Nurburgring this year in a time that's less than a minutes slower than the current outright record-holder, its cousin the Porsche hybrid

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkLMzJN6vMA