Camera -- But with a flick of the wrist I can change from a super short 8 MM fisheye to a super long 600 MM telephoto on any of my old obsolete 33MM or 16MM film Nicon, Cannon, Minulta, Mitchell, Arriflex, Bolex or Bell & howell cameras and have a higher pixal count than all but the latest scanning-back high res digital cameras.

Hey Tim, Thanks for the pics! Do you have any of the top and bottom bowl while it is burning? How much oil drips into the bottom bowl during normal operartion (i.e. after the unit is fully warmed up)?

Can you smell the burn inside the house? It would be nice to get it to be totally smoke free. Do you think that is possible with further refinements? Are you gonna work on that? I think it's great to have a burner/ heater that can run without electriciy (or minimal electricity). I will build a pot burner at some point. I have been focusing my efforts recently on my siphon nozzle burner for the hot air furnace so have not had time really. It has paid off so far since I have not used any HHO up to now. I hope to keep this streak of luck for the rest of the heating season. For comparison, I see no smoke at all out the chimney. I recently acquired a Bacharach Fyrite and will be taking some CO2 and O2 measurements to fine tune the system.

quote:

Originally posted by Tim c cook:
Camera -- But with a flick of the wrist I can change from a super short 8 MM fisheye to a super long 600 MM telephoto on any of my old obsolete 33MM or 16MM film Nicon, Cannon, Minulta, Mitchell, Arriflex, Bolex or Bell & howell cameras and have a higher pixal count than all but the latest scanning-back high res digital cameras.

What you want is a digicam that will mate up to your collection of lenses.

Well - Even after replacing the highly compressed Jpeg images with much higher resolution jpeg's the smoke pictures are a bit useless, I assume these are being highly compressed again from the web server as what I am seeing from clicking on them is that they are useless to indicate the amount of smoke coming from the chimney.

There is a bit of smoke but not a lot, it is continuous as long as the burner is operating and the smoke completely dissipates in less than 20 feet from the chimney.

I would much rather have the $25,000 dollars that that camera would cost.

Really? I mean are you saying that a digi slr has to be that expensive?

When did you last check?

I thought they were cheaper than that even new now.

eBay as always would be where I looked for a bargain price.

pixel res I grant you film is far superior if you want to blow some small part of the pic up.

But for webshots how much do you really need?

And just one half decent digi cam gives you a speed of click to posting for the not too tricky shots. Like the bowl burner and stuff.

Tim;
Check with Graydon, but it just might be profitable to do a complete write up and post pics (all of which display in full) at http://www.biodieselpictures.com/.
Ok, staright vegie isn't "biodiesel" however this is such a departure from the traditional MEN furnace that it deserves a permanent home where you can see all the pics with explanations included with each.
I have posted some of my stuff there until such a time as I do a complete upgrade to my own webpage on BD.

The quality of a camera is mostly in the quality of the lens.

I use a Canon D60 and EF "L" series lenses. I've seen people pay $3000 for a high-end pro digital cameras and slap some stupid $300 lens on it. What a joke! I'd rather buy a $300 camera and slap a $3000 lens on it.

If you have problems taking a photo of a flame or other fast moving object, just increase your shutter speed to something faster.
Most cameras have P for program mode that allows you to control the shutter or aperture.

For smoke, you would probably want a much slower shutter speed. For slower speeds you need a tripod mount or the photo will be blurry.

Also, for smoke, you need to be on the correct side of the light source. Or use a flash and make your own. Flash does a good job on smoke particles.

canola -- I still have not gotten my short camers lenses out of storage, I can't get a wide enough shot using the 70 mm end of my normal zoom lens, I will get a shot of both bowls burning eventually.

The lower bowl gets 3-4 drips/sec, sorta hard to tell as the oil sometimes drips directly through the hole but mostly it goes through the hole, runs down the underside of the fuel shoot and then down the inside of the center air passage tube, then it drips of into the lower bowl, can't see it well through the flames.

There is no smell of burning oil (or anything else) from this unit, the fire box is under a slight bit of vacuum due to the flue gasses going up the chimney so any smell would likely also go up the chimney, I don't smell anything while outside either.

I am now building another heater that will use the same style double bowl burner, it is more like the Sanders heater as I am using the 100 pound propane tank burn chamber that I was using for the now-defunct oil-o-matic burner experiment. This style vertical burn tank chamber will give more room above the burner for experimentation, I intend to try verious methods of burning the smoke in this area before it goes out the flue, will have to try something before I can get even a realistic starting point.
Wick-type kerosine heater burn without smoking so it is obviously possible, they use thin light stainless steel screens above the flame from the wick, these low-mass screens heat to red hot easilly and this seems to be hot enough to ignite the smoke, I will try this approach using perforated metal or screen whenever I run across some sheap SS material, hopefully something will come through the local salvage yard. I have some perforated sheetmetal on hand that I will try, it is not SS so won't survive long, but hopefully will provide more info.

Ant -- Yes, any digital camera that will accept existing interchangable film lenses will be expensive, several thousands just for the cheapest one. If I stumble across a digital camera cheap I may pick it up but the really cheap ones I have tried don't do what I want, most don't have true mechanical f stop settings, this is nescicary for controlling depth of focus over verious conditions. They also don't have slow shutter speeds, they do have extremely fast shutter speeds but not slow ones. High pixal count cameras also have LONG cycle times between shots, takes a lot of time to shift megga pixals out of the solid state immaging chip as it is transfered serially, film is a paralell process, everything happens at once over the entire surface of the film, much faster.

Legal -- I will see where the second burner project leads, may be worth a write-up.

Murphy -- Image quality is fine in the film prints, it even looks good after scanning and compressing heavily to jpeg image prior to uploading to this web page, just looks terrible when clicking on the links here, has to be the web software re-compressing them to either reduce storage space or to decrease download time, probably both.
The pictures make it look like a lot of smoke is billowing from the entire chimney, in reality there is only a small waft of smoke rising.
If you look at the "smoke 1" picture and look only at the darkest smoke immediatly above (no more than "3 bricks" up) and a bit to the right of the chimney, you will get an Idea of the actual amount of smoke, the other wierd billowing-looking stuff is compression or transmission artifacts caused due to the verying density of the low clouds in the background.

I disagree a bit about the need for superior lenses, even cheap lenses can take excellent pictures if used within there limits, that is one of the reasons why I prefere to have control of shutter speed, f stop, external filters, etc. Automated exposure control is nice if you can select if it controls only shutter speed or f stop, f stop is VERY importent controlling depth of focus - depth of field, this controls the entire "look" of the picture, affordable digital cameras only control shutter speed and even that is limited to "fast" (nothing less than 1/30 of a second, this requires the use of bright light, fast wide open lenses, and limits creativity), just not the same.

quote:

Originally posted by Tim c cook:
Ant -- Yes, any digital camera that will accept existing interchangable film lenses will be expensive, several thousands just for the cheapest one.

I paid $2500 for my Canon D60 about 4 years ago. Its 6 Megapixels and has an extra large sensor. Its a CMOS not a CCD sensor.
Today, my camera can be found on ebay for $500 or something cheap like that.

quote:

If I stumble across a digital camera cheap I may pick it up but the really cheap ones I have tried don't do what I want, most don't have true mechanical f stop settings, this is nescicary for controlling depth of focus over verious conditions.

All the SLR cameras I've seen with interchangeable lenses have the aperture on the lens not the camera.

quote:

They also don't have slow shutter speeds, they do have extremely fast shutter speeds but not slow ones. High pixal count cameras also have LONG cycle times between shots, takes a lot of time to shift megga pixals out of the solid state immaging chip as it is transfered

Sorry to call you on that Tim. But my 4 year old Digital D60 SLR will take long exposure shots of unlimited length.. Why does 120minutes ring a bell? Anyhow, I've taken 10 minute exposures with it plenty of times. Heck, I do 6 seconds just for fire-works on the 4th of july stuff..


For rapid shooting, the 4 year old Canon D60 will shoot 7 frames in about 2.5 or 3 seconds.

quote:

I disagree a bit about the need for superior lenses, even cheap lenses can take excellent pictures if used within there limits, that is why I want to have control of shutter speed, f stop, external filters, etc. Automated exposure control is nice if you can select if it controls only shutter speed or f stop, f stop is VERY importent controlling depth of focus - depth of field, this controls the entire "look" of the picture, affordable digital cameras only control shutter speed and even that is limited to "fast" (nothing less than 1/30 of a second, this requires the use of bright light, fast wide open lenses, and limits creativity), just not the same.

Its been a while since you've checked out real digital cameras eh? My Canon D60 (yes, the one that is 4 years old) gives the user full control over every function a normal SLR camera has. The Canon D60 was the defining moment when high level Digital SLR's surpased film cameras in an affordable package.

I had my D60 hooked up to a big fat telescope once. We took 3 and 4 minute exposures all night long. Even took a few at 30 minutes.


I have a 15mm Fisheye, 70-200/2.8L and a 100-400/4.5-5.6L I love that camera.
Got this photo on a trip to YellowStone: Taken at 350mm

Tim, Murphy,

Here's what everything on my site has been shot with:


It's a 5 Mega Pixel and is now about 3 years old. I paid about $500 for it but man it shoots great pictures. (Got it new on Ebay)

Everything I shoot for my site has been sized down with Photoshop.

Here's an example of a photo I shot that I resized down.


I'll have to go dig up the original so you can see how much the resizing in photoshop doesn't modify the image (man I love that program!)


However, if you want to send me the originals (graydonblair[at]yahoo[dot]com) I can size it with Photoshop without losing the image quality.

Also, feel free to set up an account on biodieselpictures.com and post away. I've got gobs of room for anyone that wants to post there.

If you do make an account, email me with what it is so I can authorize it (I get way too many spammers signing up for accounts these days--I nuke em if they don't email me).

-Graydon

This is what I use:

Canon D60

Nice!!!!


I'd love to get a digital SLR one day...
For now the C-5050 will have to do...
-Graydon

And the D60 is a piece of crap by todays standards.

My files are about 3 megabytes in size shooting 6 megapixels.

The new cameras today have files 6 to 10 megabytes shooting 12 megapixels. And they do upwards of 15 and 20 frames inside 2 seconds.

They blow away 35mm film. My camera is better than 35mm.. It was the first digital 35mm format camera that beat film for the cost, that's why I bought it..

Here we are 4 or 5 years later and my $2500 camera is really a piece of crap compared to what they are selling today for $1500.

But isnt that the way technology goes?

Why would I want to spend 500 to 1500 dollars for another camera, I already have several perfectly servisable cameras.

Fuji FinePix 510 is what I use. $300.00 2 years ago but cheaper now.

Murphy;
If you were at 350m from that bear, you were too close, ha!He can coved 3/4 of that ground by the time you realise what is going on. They are quite quick on their feet in spite of their HUGE size. And they have no fear of puny people either.This guy is big time telephoto material, the kind where you are on one mountain top and he is on the other, ha! That's one big bear.

quote:

Originally posted by Tim c cook:
Why would I want to spend 500 to 1500 dollars for another camera, I already have several perfectly servisable cameras.

Well of course that is your choice but is a different point of view from the one where it had to cost thousands to get one.

I for one have been educated by this side issue as my knowledge of photography is far less than yours or the others.

It has been useful for me to get some reference points on the current state of affairs.

And as tech continues to go in the direction murph pointed out the D60 will no doubt fall in price further and further until the resale value is so low that when you upgrade you just give them to the kids to learn with.

So one day the quality price break should suit you. Just keep an eye on the changing market.

And if you have several cameras already why not another one which has speedy resuts, no chemical processing, no need to wait to use all the roll of film up and goes straight into your PC for further use?

For me and for most of us that dont even classify as amatures those are the features that really attract. I would have thought they had some attraction even to professionals.

I assume you have several cameras because between them they have more flexibility and capabiltiy than one uber camera? So a digi would just be an extension of this. A new addition to the family. Once the price is low enough to be worth the features you gain.

I know my Sony used to be over $600 and is now probably less than $100 I cant tell you all it's features but it is a fixed lens. But a reasonable one. Better than most similar digis that were being made at the time.

Tim,

If you need somewhere to host the pics, I can put them up on my site. I have piles of space and BW.


Have you thought about using a propane pilot as the lower heat source and just keep all the oil in the top bowl?

This might mean more to you than it does to me and a quick search of ebay completed items shows that they sell for $50 to $100 now.


Sony DSC S70

DSC-S70 Specifications
• 12 Bit A to D Conversion: Yes
• Image Device: 1/1.8" 3.3 Megapixel
• Max Image Size: 2048 x 1536
• Format: JPEG/TIFF/MPEG
• MPEG Movie: Yes/HQ mode
• 3:2 Mode: Yes
• LCD Display: 2" 123k Pixels
• Optical Zoom: Zeiss 3x (34-102mm 35mm equivalent)
• Precision Digital Zoom: 6X
• Shutter: 18-step, 8 - 1/1,000 sec
• Aperture: 9-step, F2.0 to F8.0
• Focus: AF/5-preset manual
• Auto Exposure Programs: Aperture, Shutter, Panfocus, Landscape, Twilight, Twilight Plus, Spot Metering
• Spot Metering: Yes
• Storage Media: Memory Stick
• A/V Out: Yes
• Auto Orientation Mode: Yes
• Built-in microphone: Yes
• Built-in Speaker: Yes
• Bundled Software: Picture Gear Lite
• E-Mail Mode: Yes
• Index Playback: Yes
• Intelligent Flash: Yes/Ext Terminal
• Picture Effects: Solarize, Black & White, Sepia and Negative Art
• Protect/Delete Images: Yes
• Red Eye Reduction: Yes
• Remaining Indicator: Yes
• Self Timer: 10 Sec
• Slide Show Mode: Yes
• Text / Economy Mode: Yes
• Voice Memo: Yes

If you read Murphy's post, that pic was taken at 350 mm from the bear! That's 14" !!!. Winnie the Pooh could have stuck his tongue out and snatched that D60.

Talk about thread drift. I guess I'm just as guilty. Hope it drifts back to the original topic soon.

quote:

Originally posted by Legal Eagle:
Fuji FinePix 510 is what I use. $300.00 2 years ago but cheaper now.

Murphy;
If you were at 350m from that bear, you were too close, ha!He can coved 3/4 of that ground by the time you realise what is going on. They are quite quick on their feet in spite of their HUGE size. And they have no fear of puny people either.This guy is big time telephoto material, the kind where you are on one mountain top and he is on the other, ha! That's one big bear.