The Home Machinist!

The Ursutz burner has been around for a long time. There was one article about it in a magazine from the 1950's I think. The Ursutz starts the combustion process in a chamber that is outside of the furnace, and exhausts partially burned but very hot fuel/exhaust gasses into the furnace via the tuyer...

I also made burners for kerosene, but I had a particular situation. I wanted high and controllable heat output for a long period, to fire heavy ceramic sculpture. We were living in India, and although we had electricity, it was very unreliable. In fact, the only thing you could depend on for sure w...

Pat, it seems like you have a good handle on the process, you may want to think about trying different oil additives to your diesel fuel. I thought about oil firing one of my locomotives, so I made a trial nozzle and experimented with it on compressed air and kerosene. I was near the end of the tri...

Diesel is the fuel.
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Thanks much for the kind comments. I am quite relieved to have this engine finally finished. I have been saying I have this engine "almost" finished for years, but "almost" and "finished" are two very different things. I told my wife it took 6 months to build the engine...

I build an iron furnace back in 2012, and had a few successful iron pours with it. Due to its high mass, it was slow to melt iron, and so a couple of years ago, I build a new oversized keg furnace, and it works much better at melting iron. I am able to melt and pour gray iron with good consistency, ...

Videos of the casting of two flywheels for this build in gray iron are located here:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9dVr4 ... EXw/videos

I recently completed a green twin oscillating steam engine, which is a 60% scale model of an engine that I saw on the Preston's Services website. The only information I had was the three photos from Preston's. A 3D model was created; patterns were both 3D printed and hand-made, and two sets of casti...