another pict

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tigman -- Those sure look like industrial strength burner bowls to me.. I am in awe of a plasma cutter.

The beer keg bottom also has a flat section in it's center, about 3 inches in diameter, don't expect this to have any effect as a burner bowl except to make a nice flat section so the bowl sets level without the need of any other type of base.

Plamsa cutter + Mig welder and you can build just about anything.

Believe it or not,
I found a mig welder in someone garbage!!! Can you believe that ? Someone actually threw out a perfectly good mig welder.. Its just a small 115 volt unit but it works great for small jobs.

It was dirty as all heck when I found it.. Looks like the owner was sanding lots of bondo or something.. It had a 1/4 inch of bondo gunk covering the entire thing.. Maybe that's why they tossed it out.. I spent about an hour or two cleaning it up and now it looks almost like its never been used.. It cleaned up really nice.. Probably a $200 welder.. It even came complete with a 2 lb roll of wire still inside it..

Cool eh?

Now if only someone would throw out a nice 50 ton press-brake..

I haven't run across a good deal on a tig welder yet but I did buy a 5 ton hydraulic press for $2.00 at a local auction sale, leaks a bit but works fine otherwise.

A small tig welder is nice for thin stuff like car bodies and the like, I don't do too much welding on that, my stick welder works fine on anything 1/16 inch thick and up and I have a lot more control over the weld technique and I can select the appropriate welding rod for the type of weld needed.
I picked up a few 3/32 SS rods to test/learn with while welding up the SS upper burner bowl, Expensive rods!!

I picked up a SS beer keg today but have to wait for my ebay order of 4 1/2 inch cut-off disks to show up through the mail, likely be after the end of the year before I get to make up the SS burner bowls due to all the christmas mail.

Hey Tim, I'm wondering if the ss strips in windshield wiper blades would work as a ss rod? They are plentyfull and free. I gotta get myself a welder one of these days

How much trouble do you think I'll have lighting my stainless burners... 10 gauge is 1/8" thick so they are a little heavy.. Are you lighting with kerosene or bio or just preheating with oxy acet or in tim's case just a preburn with wood?? Tigman

SS wiper blade strips -- Don't think they will work for my stick welder, it needs some type of flux over the rods, might work if using a TIG welder ?

lighting the double bowl burner - I pour a double shot glass of diesel into the bottom bowl, turn on the fuel feed pump for a few seconds until there is a small amount of fuel in the upper bowl then turn the pump off and use a propane torch for about 10 seconds pointed into the lower bowl's pool of diesel, this gets it burning well enough it stays lit. after about 30 seconds to a minute the upper bowl self-ignites and I let it burn dry to heat the bowl, then turn the fuel pump back on - up and running on veg, used motor oil lites even easier.

If I pour a couple ounces of diesel in the upper bowl also at first I can just light it up and forget it with the fuel feed running from the start.

The 1/8 inch thickness will take a bit longer to heat but I don't think it will be any more than an extra minute or so, if even that, especially if you prime both bowls with diesel.

At the current warm temps I keep having to relight the burners because the fuel feed pump stops turning at the low voltage I am giving it, otherwise the stove makes way too much heat. Priming both bowls with diesel was using up a good bit of diesel after 5-6 relights so I started only priming the bottom bowl and switching the fuel feed on/off just to save on diesel.

I have been reading this thread over and I have had this same type of setup to heat an old hot tub. You guys will laugh at this but, I got this free hot tub whose electronics were broken. So a friend and I used the idea that Roger Sanders used but with a frying pan burner in the bottom, since I don't have access to a lathe and aluminum. We put a coil of copper inside the tank above the burner and a submersible pump in the hot tub, works great! When we show our friends they think it looks like frankenstien. Anyhow, we experimented with a double burner design but have since went back to single burner with a little wood on the bottom in order to heat the frying pan. We had problems with the double burner because what I did was drilled small holes in the top pan which dripped into the bottom pan to feed it fuel, but those holes would become clogged and it wouldn't work that good, but your idea of cutting a hole in the middle for air and different oil feed for the burners should work good. The upside down pan on top would probably work good too. I will have to try some experimenting too.

Anyhow, I would recommend using stainless steel for the bottom pan and cast iron for the top. I used two different frying pans in there (as a single burner) and no kidding we melted the sides off the pans so that they wouldn't hold any oil!
I have since went to a cast iron pan since it can take the heat and have had no problems since. The only problem is that it takes longer to light.

The reason I would suggest using the stainless one on the bottom is that it burns at a lower temperature than the top one.

Maybe I wasn't using a thick enough pan but I would say it was at least an 1/8" thick, and still melted.

I will have to take some pictures of this setup, its pretty neat, and I will have to modify my frying pans so that I can have an air tube on the top one which should work better than the previous way I had it.

Tim ,only because i have an air source and am capable of fabricating the fuel tank...I intend on no pump and no gravity... Presure in the fuel tank and a true needle valve for fuel control.. Depending on how heavy the oil is I may have to vary psi... I currently heat my filtering tanks with hot water elements and they are insulated 300 gallon fuel tanks, once heated the elements rarly turn on set at 80 degrees so fuel should be thin enough.. Tigman www.swainsspring.com

Tim;
Save the diesel and use biodiesel instead. Granted it does take a little more to get it goibg, but once it does it roars. A piece of methanol soaked paper towel in onoe corner and a couple minutes patience and it should be burning fine.

moparman -- I don't dought you were able to melt the sides of of regular pans, it deffinatly gets hot if you feed it enough oil, I have had the first 3 feet of the standard sheetmetal flue pipe glowing a bright bright red, almost melt-through dull yellow in places, by having a flameout at startup and relighting the burner with both bowls full of oil, scarry..

I have not had any problem overheating the bottom steel bowl as it runs a lot cooler than the top bowl, SS wouldn't hurt and I intend to use one of the SS beerkeg ends for a new bottom bowl once I get the SS upper bowl made up. I suspect a cast iron upper bowl would work just fine if you can get the air passage tube lower end weld so that it does not crack and leak oil, the bowl runs too hot to allow the use of brazing so this leaves some sort of true weld, Cast iron welding rod is available but difficult to use, if the SS bowl works I think it should be much easier to build than using cast iron.

Fuel feed shoot -- This has worked well, the small 3/32 drip hole has never clogged and the metal has not corroded or burnt away at all, I assume this is due to the cooling effect of the constant stream of cool oil flowing over it.

tigman -- Certainly should work fine as long as your power doesn't go off or you have some sort of a hand operated pump, I guess a simple bicycle pump would work ok for 10 pounds pressure.

I just spied a barrel of used tractor hydraulic fluid at my local salvage yard, if the price is cheap I will try burning this somewhat thicker oil, shouldn't have to adjust anything using the positive displacement pump as the feed control.

What sort of insulation are you using on your 300 gallon tanks, are these standard oval fueloil tanks. I use these for storage but don't have any heaters in them yet, need to pick up another one so I can shift the oil around and add the heaters. How many and what wattage heaters are you using in these tanks, it gets pretty cold here sometimes, more like Boise than Great Falls most years, only stays continually below freezing for a couple weeks at a time on-n-off..

Legal -- I don't make biodiesel so diesel is more available and it is a bit cheaper than kero, I mistakenly tried a bit of E85 for startup fuel, the burns on the top of my fingers are just now healing up.

I still intend to give the upper bowl cover concept a try once I get the time, trying to get some basic reliable oil heat in both houses has the priority just now, don't have enough firewood for the entire winter if it gets really cold and the downed wood from the recent ice storm is a bit green to give off much heat.

Tim do you think it will take 10 psi?? From using air as a transfer method before I was hoping that 2-3 psi would shoot oil thru a 3/32 hole about 8-10 feet, and if that is the case and I have a 120 gallon tank at unregulated 140 psi, a power outage would have to be overnight or something?? As far as tanks they are round tanks with actual enclosures "little storage buildings fiberglass ins" just 4500 wat 220v elements on 110 volts each, new pipe bungs welded into the side about 1/4 of the way up from bottom is location.. Tigman

The 10 pounds is based on info in the Sanders heater article indicating he has good stable drip with his oil supply being 30 feet higher than the stove, calculates to about 10.4 pounds pressure, and on my less-than-reliable drip using 2 feet of head, calculates to about .7 pounds pressure.
There is just something wierd about low pressure thick sticky oil and small passages, it just sometimes stops flowing ?

Using your pressure tank concept it should be fairly simple to test using different pressures, this would give us all more info to design future fuel systems with.

Storage tanks - OK - I intend to do something similar to your "yard barn" tank concept. I have a 500 gallon round horizontal farm tank that I intend to place inside of the cargo box on an old gas engined dodge military ambulance, this box will be well insulated, I had expected to need to use up to four 220 volt 4500 watt heaters powered on 110, glad to hear it likely won't take that much heat.


moparman -- What sort of combustion air setup does your hot tub heater use, is the air presented directly above the burner so that it can flow with force down and outward across the top of the oil pool ?

Yes sir it is. Its just like the Roger Sanders air intake tube.

I cut the ends out of the SS beer keg today, the metal in the actual tank portion of the keg is not as thick as the upper and lower add-on rings, the tank metal measures to just a bit less than .05 thick, 18 guage, the Odd thickness is likely due to the tank being deep-drawn out of some slightly thicker metal. This should work OK if I can keep from burning holes in it while welding in the 3 inch O.D. center SS air passage tube.
I was expecting something a bit thicker, may be that some sort of SS pan or skillet would actualy end up being made of heavier metal ? I will use this for now and see how long it lasts.

I used my stick welder to cut the ends out of the tank, worked better than I expected, turned the amps up and used some old 1/8 inch welding rod, the curf of the cut was between 1/4 and 3/8 inch wide but this thin metal cut like butter as fast as I could move the rod, it is a ragged cut but OK to just chop out the end sections.
Fogging up my welding helmet with boiling beer steam was a first.

The stainless from the keg shows a bit of light surface rust so it is not the highest alloy stainless, probably why the keg ended up in the salvage yard.

This thin material grinds to shape just fine with an electric hand held angle grinder using standard 1/4 inch thick abrasive disks, hope to get the new SS upper bowl done tomorrow as the original one is just about done for, badly warped, much thinner than it was originally, air passage tube has a couple of places where the upper half of the tube is completely burnt away, the 1/4 inch bolt legs are only about a 1/10 inch thick and bent in wierd shapes, almost afraid to scrape on it for fear of it disintegrating completely. I have been burning 4-5 gallons/day of veg for the last couple weeks, 10-12 hours straight every evening.

I cut out a few small pieces of the thicker end rings, they cut a bit slower but still worked ok, I will use a bit of this slightly thicker metal for the fuel shoot.

I've worked on a beer keg as part of my wood burner. Just used an angle grinder for all the cutting.

Once I got the chunks of the keg cut into sections I also did all the other cutting/shaping using my 14 inch abrasive chop saw and an angle grinder, worked fine, wears the abrasive disks a little faster and they throw off a small visable amount of gray dust that I don't see grinding normal steel, surprisingly the SS cuts about like normal steel but with less sparks.

I got the new SS upper bowl up and burning today, looks like a winner, time will tell. It took a bit of practice to keep from burning through the thin 18 guage bowl metal while welding but I finaly got it, lukily the 308 stainless rod flows extremely fluidly and sticks well even when moving it fast. The bowl is only about 1/2 inch deep and sort of flimsy but works ok, had to bang it into shape somewhat after welding the SS center air tube in place. The beer keg had sort of a 6-petal 8 inch diameter cloverleaf design stamped in the end to stiffen the thin metal so the bowl is just a bit over 8 inches in diameter. I used some of the 100/0000 thick SS metal from the rim for the legs and the fuel shoot. I made the legs so that the under side of the upper bowl is 3 1/2 inches above the lower bowl, and the air passage is just under 3 inches ID (3 inch OD SS tubing),(I relocated the stoves cool combustion air intake tube "up" the appropriate amount to keep 5 inches between the top of the upper bowl and the bottom of the air intake tube). The burner doesn't "roar" as much as it did with the old upper bowl so the airflow has definatly been changed in some manner. It still burns with mostly bright yellow flames and it still produces a bit of black smoke.

I have only burnt this for about 4 hours but so far it is burning a lot cleaner than the first steel upper bowl, it takes a couple minutes longer to get up to temp and shows a thin layer of carbon inside the top side of the bowl, where the fuel pool is vaporizing, for a few minutes, but once everything gets hot the carbon on the top side goes completely away (as does the liquid fuel pool) and you see the shiny metal bowl.

With the old steel bowl being only 2 inches above the lower bowl I was getting a 1/2 to 5/8 inch thick layer of soft fluffy carbon on the BOTTOM side of the upper bowl, I think this was from the bottom bowl's flame contacting the metal of the upper bowl and being cooled enough to stop burning and create soot. I don't know if it is the extra height between the bowls that allows the bottom flame to completely burn because it is no longer contacting the upper bowl, or if the larger upper bowl air passage is allowing more air to get to the flame in the lower bowl and causing it to burn better, or if the extra air is blowing the bottom flame more sideways over the top of the bottom bowl ? - I suspect it is a combination of all these things, but there is NO obvious soot collecting on the bottom of the upper bowl as of yet.

Once the burner is up to temp (5-6 minutes from cold start) the upper SS bowl appears to burn absolutely clean, no soot on the bottom, no soot or carbon on the top, and so far, no sign of ANY of the glowing sawdust type stuff either ? This is burning veg oil from the same batch that has been creating varying amounts of all of these in the old steel bowl ? I will have to burn this for a few more days to be sure..

sounds good. Look forward to seeing pics if you get a cam for xmas.

quote:

Originally posted by Ant:
sounds good. Look forward to seeing pics if you get a cam for xmas.

Even if a cheapo film camera from WalMart and I would be happy to scan them after having them developped. I wanna see pipcs too. This is just too good a thread to leave to the immagination.
Building one of these is a project that is on the to-do list this winter/Spring.

Sorry - no digi camera yet -- I will take pictures using my normal 35MM still camera and have a digital disc made along with the prints shortly.

The new upper SS bowl is performing flawlessly, I only clean it every 3-4 days due to how clean it burns. By lifting the upper bowl 3 1/2 inches above the lower bowl I have almost completely eliminated any soot collecting on the underside of the upper bowl.

the extra "baking" time between cleanings does produce maybe a teaspoon of hard-baked coal to chip out but it still takes less than 5 minutes to clean. This new SS bowl is made from much thinner metal than the original steel bowl, .045 thick rather than .090 thick, the only differance that I see is that the oil does not vaporize quite as quickley in this bowl, you can see an actual pool of boiling oil over the bottom of the bowl, covering about two thirds of the area around the center air opening, and it is possible to overflow this upper bowl if you feed it way too much oil, I did this accidentally by somehow bumping the voltage control knob on the power supply that powers the drip oil pump. I noticed the room getting cooler and when checking the stove I found about a gallon of oil covering the floor around the stove, lukily the high fuel rate had cooled the bowls enough that the fire had gone completely out, a half grocery bag of sawdust cleaned up the oil without incident.

Fuel pump improvement -- I am still using the small 12 volt DC military surplus fuel oil pump. I was having problems with this pump stopping running for no apparent reason when powering it with about 3 volts. I opened the pump up to check for clogging and found that this 12 volt pump is constructed a bit differently than my other similar 24 volt small military fuel pump. This pump uses gears with much finer teeth and the gears are about 3/16 inch thick and 3/8 in diameter. The finer teeth do not allow the gears to pass actual chunks of crud through the gears but I have not had this be a problem as all the oil has been filtered.

Out of frustration with the pump stopping for no apparent reason I replaced the fuel feed input lines with much larger ID lines. Originally I was using a piece of 1/4 inch steel brake tubing as the fuel pickup inside the jerry cans, this tubing was bent in a manner so that the lower end drew the oil from about 3/4 inch above the bottom of the can as to not pick up any debree in the can, this steel tubing was connected to the pump using about 3 foot of 3/16 ID windshield wiper fluid rubber hose. I replaced all this with a simalrly bent piece of 3/8 inch steel brake line tubing and much stiffer 3/8 ID standard rubber fuel hose, THE PUMP HAS RUN FLAWLESSLY EVER SINCE, it also moves more oil for any given voltage than it did with the original restrictive small fuel pickup tubing, just too much restriction for the tiny amount of vacuum being produced by the slow-turning pump. It appeares that the pump would stop turning not due to any clogging but because it wouuld run dry of oil and would loose lubrication on the side of the gears, this extra drag was more than the small motor could overcome when being powered by such a low voltage.
My power supply only goes down to about 3 volts but this still moves too much oil for the current outside temps, I burn the stove for an hour or so and then shut it down for several hours til the house cools down again, plenty of fuel flow now.