This burner project pretty much terminated itself last night when the 60 year old electric spark ignition transformer stopped working. This transformer is enough different from any of the ones in current burners that I don't intend to spend the time trying to get something working. I am modifying the basic burner stand and tank into another double bowl style drip fed burner, I know this drip style burner works, even in a power outage, and it burns nice and clean and quiet even if there is a bit of smoke going out the chimney.

Working with a gun style burner has been a learning experiance, if you need LOTS of heat they would be the way to go but are big, heavy, noisy, smelly, need a good bit of electricity and a good bit of continuous maintanance, and drip a bit.

I still intend to build one of these but using a more modern Wayne gun style oil burner modified with a syphon nozzle, this will be used to heat a vertical coil of pipe from an steam cleaner to heat water, the excess radiated heat will also heat the workshop garage, the noise and other drawbacks are a reasonable tradeoff for this purpose.

I will post what pictures I have taken here once I get the film developed.

OK - Pictures --

This picture is of the entire heater, it consists of a base, the oil-o-matic oil burner unit bolts vertically through the base, the heating chamber is a 100 pound propane tank that has had it's entire bottom removed, the tank simply sets on the base, no fasteners used, makes it easy to open up for whatever reason.

The smoke is about what it produced until the tank came up to temp, the extra concentrated heat would then allow the fuel/air fog to combust into a much larger flame.

complete_heater-much_smoke.jpg (37 Kb, 25 downloads)

This is the poor startup flame that produced all the smoke in the above picture. This is as much of a flame as I ever got it to produce without the burn chamber tank installed.

tiny_flame-wider_view-base_shown.jpg (309 Kb, 26 downloads)

A bit closer look at this poor flame.

tiny_flame-mediam_view.jpg (252 Kb, 26 downloads)

This shows the burner unit mounted under the base, the fuel and oil pump assembly has been removed from the burner, the piece of 2 inch pipe seen below the burner is the fuel preheat unit, a water heater element can be seen screwed into the end of this 8 inch length of pipe, the fuel simply flowed slowly through the pipe. This preheater seemed to work ok but I gave up on this heater before adding a thermostat to the heater to keep the oil at an even temp.

base_with_burner_unit_and_fuel_heater-pumps_removed.jpg (325 Kb, 27 downloads)