Paul Borian on thu 21 jan 10
nice story Vince told - but i thought for sure that he was going to say the
dude spilled the engine oil and it ran into his studio and formed a layer
on top of the six inches of water on the floor....but i am glad it did not
happen!
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Vince Pitelka
Date: Jan 20, 2010 8:00pm
Subject: Re: Oil burner explained
To: Clayart@lsv.ceramics.org
CC:
> Wayne Seidl wrote:
> Does anyone on the list have any experience with waste automotive engine
> oil
> put through a household style oil burner (as in furnace burner)? I have
> about 50 gallons I can access (and more coming). Thinning the oil would
> not
> be a problem.
> Wayne -
> I have told this story before on Clayart, but it has been a few years, an=
d
> it bears repeating. This does not address a household oil burner, but if
> the oil was spiked as indicated below and run through a proper filter, it
> should work fine. Even used motor oil is pretty clean, in terms of
> filtering out impurities.
> Early in my pottery career in Humboldt County (NW California) I knew a
> self-trained potter named Father Doug Nordby. He had sent in for a
> Universal Life Church certificate, and performed weddings for the bikers,
> thus the "Father." Before he got into clay, he had been known as "Father
> Drug Nordby."
> Doug had a very funky home and studio up on the bluff above Trinidad,
> California, north of Arcata. His studio was a low-ceiling structure built
> in kind of a low area on poorly-draining soil, and when it rained there
> was
> six inches of water on the floor. He had worked as a fisherman, so he
> would
> just go about his business wearing high rubber boots, sloshing around in
> the
> studio. His wheel was up on concrete blocks.
> But I digress. Doug fired with waste engine oil. He'd pick up 55-gallon
> drums of waste engine oil from service stations, and with a little 12-vol=
t
> transfer pump he'd move it up to another 55-gallon drum mounted atop an
> old
> redwood stump about fifty feet from his kiln, for gravity feed. He spiked
> each 50 gallons of drain oil with one gallon of gasoline to make it more
> fluid and combustible.
> He fired a large catenary arch hardbrick salt kiln using Leach-style drip
> oil burners in three burner ports. The burners smoked like hell early in
> the
> firing (most people use auxiliary propane burners during that period), bu=
t
> when it developed some heat in the burner ports and firebox he would moun=
t
> three Kirby vacuum cleaner blowers in front of the burner ports and from
> there the thing climbed like a rocket. But it was no damn fun to listen t=
o
> at all. You couldn't carry on a conversation within 100 feet of the kiln
> once those Kirby blowers were going.
> The kiln was so loose that in any number of places you could look through
> the cracks and see the pots firing inside. He was producing so many BTUs
> that it didn't matter. Father Doug made nice, rugged folk pots. I wish I
> had some today.
> - Vince
> Vince Pitelka
> Appalachian Center for Craft
> Tennessee Tech University
> vpitelka@dtccom.net; wpitelka@tntech.edu
> http://iweb.tntech.edu/wpitelka
| |
|
