Safety Considerations.
Although this project is not difficult in itself, and has been successfully undertaken by at least 14 persons that I am aware of,.... The safety aspect is very serious matter especially if you are going to use it for heating a dwelling or inhabited workshop etc. Do not ever underestimate fire as a safety hazard, nor combustion gasses. All of these risks can be minimised by paying some attention to the construction and installation of your heater, with particular attention to, Isolation, insulation and good venting of the flue gasses.

The History. (For those of you who have not read it before)
Sometime about 1997, several local farm machinery mechanics and I, were discussing the feasibility of a home handyman being able to develop a heater capable of burning waste oil (sump oil) without smoke or smell. We were aware that there are several commercial models of heater available, but all of these are both expensive and require the use of electric pumps and fans for combustion. I wanted to avoid the use of electricity, so that my heater could go on working in the event of a loss of power. After much animated discussion I could not convince my detractors that it was possible, so being a determined type of bloke, I set out to prove my theory that any carbonaceous fuel will burn properly so long as it has enough heat and air, with the air having to be well mixed with the fuel. All I had to do was work out how to achieve it.

     The first working prototype took about three months to build, as firstly I had to decide on the method of combustion and then work out what materials I had at hand to make the parts out of.

     To ensure that it would withstand the heat generated I decided to use cast iron and cast steel wherever possible and found that this was easily and cheaply found in the junk heap of a local trucking company. Worn out brake drums were found that fitted together with an almost airtight seal, and an old clutch plate and cylinder liner just about completed my list of parts. All that remained was a pan in which to burn the oil and a cover for it, for this I used an old cast iron camp oven and a spring steel disc plough shear. (This has since been relaced with a piece of 6mm steel plate). There was not a lot of thought needed to put these things together in such a way as to give me the type of combustion that I wanted and also make it reasonably easy to assemble and pull apart for maintenance, so I just built it "by the seat of my pants". The working drawings found thtough this site were drawn up long after the initial design and building phase was completed .

     The resulting "contraption" worked almost faultlessly right from the first test burn, with only a little bit of experimentation needed to decide the best size, number and location for the air inlet holes in the secondary flame tube. I ended up making up an extension for the drill so that I could actually drill the holes in the tube while it was burning, any mistakes were simply welded over with a nickel electrode, this ended up making the tube rather untidy looking, so once it had been determined what was needed I simply counted the holes and made a new tube with the holes drilled in a neat diagonal pattern.