Waste Oil Burners

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Bruce_Mowbray
Posts: 705
Joined: Sat Jan 04, 2003 7:45 pm
Location: Pennsylvania

Waste Oil Burners

Post by Bruce_Mowbray »

There has been some interest in waste oil burners. The designs on this page seems like a good one. I'm going to build one one near future and I'll be making some parts for my riding cars. I have about 300 pounds of random pieces of cast tool and jig plate that I'll be melting down.

http://www.backyardmetalcasting.com/oilburners10.html

Enjoy!!
Bruce Mowbray
Springville & Southern RR
TMB Manufacturing & Locomotive Works
norman
Posts: 50
Joined: Tue May 18, 2010 5:16 pm

Re: Waste Oil Burners

Post by norman »

I built my waste oil burner sort of on that design. It works great! You don't need a roaring fire to melt aluminum. I've had the furnace hot enough to melt the lifting lugs off of my crucible. The lugs are a wrist pin it's cut in half so one pin will out fit one crucible I then weld a heavy washer on the end of the lug to prvent the lifting tongs from slipping off.
One thing I found is if you have a drain hole in the bottom of the furnace some oil will run out of it so you will want some way to recover the oil and keep it from catching on fire. I plugged the hole with furnace cement it still weeps oil. I set a small cake pan under it and as it collects oil I drain it into a jug and put it back into the fuel jug. I'm going to weld a catch pan under it soon and put a covered catch pan off to the side so it will be a little easier to keep the oil off of the ground , Keep it covered so no metal gets into the oil and hopefully it won't catch it on fire.
When using the waste oil this furnace will get very hot and can melt just about everything including the refractory.
I use a 1/8" ball valve to control the oil feed it needs to be open about 1/8 of a turn or just cracked open. You could try a needle valve but they can plug off if the ball valve gets a little trash in it just blip the ball valve open then back to almost closed be ready for the furnace to go into after burner mode as the fire will shoot pretty high. I filter the oil through a window screen wire to get the worst chunks out. I get the used oil from a friend who runs a quick change oil center so the oil is fresh used and no water is in it. I'll burn about 1/2 gal of oil to do 2 8lbs pours takes about 20 minutes from furnace start to first pour so it seems to work fast at least for me it does. For a blower I bought a hoover vacuum at a pawn shop($5.00) for blower control I use a light dimmer wired to control the motor speed and a plate over the air intake to also control the amount of air into the furnace. You don't need tons of air so the speed is set about as slow as I can get the controller to go and 1/2 of the intake of the air is blocked off. The furnace's flame will be an orange to red color and it looks like a tornado coming out of the top there is no smoke or smell. Only time there is smoke or smell is at start up and shut down. You can jack the air up and the oil flow and make a white blinding fire it sounds like a jet engine then, I do not run it there as that is where the thing will start melting everything.
Be very careful not to create a smoke cloud and stay away form them they can flash into a fire ball as the smoke is oil vapor. where I live the wind does not stop blowing so I set up the furnace so any smoke is down wind from me and the fuel tank. Its best to keep any oil spilled cleaned up. Try to get used to operating the furnace starting and stopping it before you try to melt with it. My furnace will burn on for over 30 minutes once the oil is off,so I choke off the air and let it burn there is just enough air coming in to keep it from smoking that way.
Good luck and have fun.
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