As I mentioned in my last post about setting up a waste oil burner I have got an extra needle valve for controlling the air to the nozzle separate to the air going into the tank. You can see the new valve on the left of the tank above, at the base of the handle. It's a bit easier to control than what I was doing before:
I managed to run out of Kerosene for the blowtorch so to light the burner I was experimenting with using a little methylated spirit burner just below the intake so the flame was getting sucked into the pipe. It worked, however there is a leak in the burner so I'll have to make another one or find another way to get this working as the burner goes out almost as soon as the flame is removed from the intake.
The next thing I will probably try is to make a low pressure high volume burner. Using my reversible shop-vac as an air supply. Another thing I may try is to get a Delavan burner nozzle which have removable jets and can be configured with different spray patterns. This would give me quite a bit of flexability in terms of what I do with the burner.
On Sunday we managed to find the warmest thing in town, and a good thing too. It would've been a fairly miserable, cold day otherwise.
That's one very big heater. This is the NSWGR Beyer Garratt 6029 which was running tours out of Bathurst over the weekend. We decided to drop by and have a look. I also managed to grab some video of it starting and also of it climbing the hill at Tumulla.
This is a piece of burned coal that managed to get caught in my hair when we actually rode the train. It was fair getting going so there was a good bit of draft. With a stronger draft the fire is made hotter but it also causes stuff like this to get pulled out of the chimney.
This is a video I took of it starting from the platform at Bathurst:
And here it is going up the hill at Tumulla. I didn't have a tripod for my phone and my hands are far too shaky to hold a camera for this sort of video so I sat the phone on top of a star picket as a kind of monopod. While not being perfect I think it dis help greatly.
That's all for now. I'm off to find another heater though.
So today at work I came across a really cool feature in Microsoft Excel 2013. Enter the Sparkline.
Probably more of a gimmick but they look cool. They are a little chart that is just inside a cell. It can be a line,column or win/loss. They are easy to create and could be used if you don't the all of the features and hassle of a full chart.
Here's how to create a sparkline in excel: Start by putting you data into one column. There aren't any labels so they don't really matter for this.
Then in the Insert tab on the ribbon find the Sparkline section and choose the style you want. This time we will create a win/loss style.
This will open the Sparkline dialog.
Select the data range. Make sure you don't select any labels as this will give an error.
When the Sparkline is created it will be small, the size of your cell so you will probably want to make the cell bigger.
And there you have it.
Probably just a gimmick but might be useful eventually.
That's right, with compressed air, waste oil and a blowtorch I have made fire at home. Starting with this beast of a thing on the right:
And a bunch of fittings:
And some Pipe:
I managed to make an oil burner. I put an outlet in the bottom of the tank, blocked off one of the ports and put a T-piece on one of the other ports so I could let air into the tank.
I put the air in through a regulator I got from the hardware store. I'm not sure if it's because it was a cheap one, or it's designed to operate at higher pressure, or the setup was just wrong but I found that by clamping down on the plastic air hose going to the nozzle I could get the burner to run reliably. I had put a needle valve in the fuel flow so I had control of air and fuel. But I think the control of air was still too coarse. Before next weekend I will get another needle valve for the air and use that to control it, rather than a set of multi-grips:
While setting this up I did manage to tidy things up with a bit of cotton twine and parceled the fuel and air hoses together a bit to help control the tangle before reaching the mixer.
Hopefully this weekend I will get some more fittings and then will be able to get a video of this beast of a thing running. I used the blowtorch we saw here to light up the burner, but I had to keep it on hand as it was very prone to flameout which I think was because there was too much air coming through because the fuel is too viscous at the cooler winter temperatures.
Now that it is starting to cool down I have got some Metho for lighting up this burner. Unfortunately I haven't quite got the amount that I need right so starting it gets a little exciting. If anyone is interested I will do a video of me setting it on fire. Erm, lighting it...
