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Waste Oil Forge?


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I am in the conceptual stage of designing an waste oil forge since good coal is difficult to come by. I have some 16 inch 1/8 inch wall stainless tube. How long (deep) do I want the forge to be?
How many burners do I need for say 24 inch deep or say from 24 inch to 48 inch deep? I want to make a sliding back wall for longer work. Is this a good idea? I am leaning to use air atomized burners as I believe they will provide the best combustion. The front wall will be a brick pile with supporting framework. I may use propane injection for fire starting. Should I use low density castable refractory as a liner with a firebrick floor? What about kaowool, isn't it a little flimsy? I want to mount the whole forge on steel implement wheels.

Am I on the right track?
Warren

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Heating iron in oil fired furnaces is nothing new. Large forging plants commonly used large dual purpose forges/boilers to heat iron and provide steam for the steam hammers. All the gasses went up the stack. My Dad had a boiler that burned heavy black oil to run his still. The oil was preheated and atomized with a steam jet burner which he made. This was over a hundred horse power boiler.

What is needed to successfully burn heavy oil is a large firebox. From what I have seen, the smaller the firebox, the lighter the oil. The question is how large (or small) does one need to burn motor oil which is much lighter than the oil my Dad burned in his still.

There are quite a bit more heat units in heavier fuels as opposed to propane and successfully burning these should be an advantage. One could design an end fired forge with a stack at the rear instead of a tangiently fired forge. This may allow heavier oil fuels.
Warren More thoughts to come on Oil smoke toxisity

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when you say wast oil is it motor oil or vegtable oil as for the vegtable oil if you filter it cut it with a quart of gas for every 5 gallons it will thin it enough to put it through a becket oil burner plug it in and go now i've never tryed to forge with that burner but we have one hooked to the furnce for casting and the pyro meter goes to 2400 and we pined it so i gets hot enough with the price of diesel i wouldn' even mess with the wast oil if you run the becket oilburner it uses about a gallon an hour a lot cheaper then propane

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search forums.dfoggknives.com for "waste oil forge" there's a lot of discussion, as well as pictures and details on the waste oil forge I built and use. It's a vertical gasser style.

Basically it's a 10 inch tall chamber 5 inches in diameter, surrounded by lots and lots of insulation. I use 2 inches of koawool covered in a thick slurry of AP Green 36. The floor is cast refractory cement, so that unburnt oil does not soak into the floor, destroying it. The walls are protected by the thick coat of AP Green, nd hold up very well. The floor does need to be castable or firebrick, though.

There is one burner in my forge, 3/4 inch tubing connected to a blower, with oil dripping into the air pipe through a needle valve. Gravity is more than adequate for fuel injection. Just use a needle valve to control it. Pressurized flammable liquid is dangerous, and is over-engineering.

Use as many burners/injectors as you need to get an even heat. OR, better yet, take a look at the "tunnel forge" blueprint (there's also a small video of it on youtube). It's a gas forge, but for long lain-on-their-sides forges it works great. Just put one powerful burner on one end of a very insulated long tube, the heat evens out over the whole length of the insulated tube.

good luck,
it's great to see more people with waste oil forges!
Archie

Edited by Archie Zietman
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Archie, Thank you for the positive comments. Air atomized burners don't use pressurized oil. They don't even use gravity pressure but rather the atomizing air causes a vacuum which draws the oil into the burner tip. The fuel oil is finely atomized which should result in hot and rapid combustion. Another plus is that one can burn heaver oils with no burner tip clogging. The only downside which I see is that you need some air at 20 to 25 psi.
Warren

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My old book, Heat Treatment and Metallography of Steel, 1924 and 1935, by Horace C. Knerr, states that for large operations, oil furnaces are (were) the most popular but "it's difficult to maintain low furnace temperatures, such as used in tempering tool steel, in oil fired furnaces." This could be important for heat treating for tools or blades.

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Hi all
We burn waste oil in our furnaces. We have also had the stack emmissions tested in regard to pollution, harmful compounds etc. The main emmissions from waste oil you will get are sulfur dioxide, soot (carbon). The testing we had done was done for a development approval to relocalte our business into town. As far as the report was concerned we have about as harmful emmissions as a fast food resturant. The only thing I will note about burning oil is you will likely end up with a carbon(coke) deposit on the opposite wall to your burner if it impinges on it. These carbon deposits (we call them old men) normally build up over a month then get to heavy and break off. The only problem with this is it takes some refractory with it each time it does so. We have also had this problem burning straight diesel. Having said all the above we do buy our oil from an oil supplier, who normally sells us good quality waste oil with a minimum of water, antifreeze, etc in it (normally). One problem we do have with oil is the grade does vary occasionally and can be hard to light when cold. Preheating does help. We use an oxytorch to help light them.
Any questions I'll try to answer them.
Phil

Edited by forgemaster
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I'm curious, since there are diesel forges that have been mentioned... would it be possible to burn a bio diesel? I have studied several plans for changing a diesel truck over to straight filtered vegetable oil and or the process of turning that vegetable oil into a bio diesel. It isn't nearly as hard as one might assume, the biggest draw back I have found in either plan is the burning of the oil is said to make the truck (in this case truck your case maybe forge) smell like french fries.

So if the technology is already there for a diesel forge, if a little effort was given, free diesel is possible... oh and they say the vegetable oil salvaged from oriental restaurants is better than a fast food restaurant???

James (uh oh I'm thinking out loud again :D)

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I have played with quite a few w/o burners and recently have been turned on to a siphon nozzle set up that a guy on bymc is letting folks try out, after trying it I went and bought one for myself, it is the most powerful, tunable w/o burner I have ever used with the widest burn range and when adjusted properly puts out no smoke or unburnt oil.
I have only used it so far for casting but hopefuly over the course of the winter am going to build a forge to use it in.
It's a long thread but some of it you can just skim through if you want,BackyardMetalcasting - Lionel's Laboratory

welder19

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Ironrose
I don't see any problem with burning biodiesel it should burn just fine once the forge/firebox is heated. Vegetable is the source for biodiesel. In producing biodiesel from veg oil the glycerol Is extracted. There should be no problem in burning raw veg oil. Some people thin it with some diesel oil.
Warren

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Someone smart has figured this out before. How does one match the nozzle capacity in gallons per hour with the volume (cu.ft.) of the Forge/firebox?
I suppose that there are charts where this has been all figured out. Air atomized nozzles are available from 1/4 gallons per hour to over one and above gph. I am looking at Delevan nozzles but I believe there are others. I am pretty sure that if one over fuels the fire you will get a lot of smoke, poor heating and wasted fuel. One can and should throttle the oil into the nozzle, however, for best efficiency the maximum oil flow ought to fairy closely match the firebox capacity. Ain't that so?
Warren

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The one I have is .75 gph and I can adj it over a pretty wide range by adj the air and oil, it is so far working out perfectly, I wouldn't want any smaller and if you go any bigger keep in mind your going to use a lot more air, so you would need a good size air compressor to run it.
If your going to use it in a fairly small forge then you could probably go with a .5 gph, but like I said I can turn mine down pretty low.
Mine is a Hago, this one to be exact Patriot Supply -
and this is the fitting Patriot Supply - 030L4067

welder19

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