Had to do some fabricobulating...

[cathead]

A few days ago, I made a trip to the scrap yard with nothing better to do. Anyhow, they had this gas generator-battery charger
outfit that wouldn't run. It had a fuel starvation problem so I blew out the fuel line and had it running in a few minutes. I do this
sort of stuff just to stay in their good graces. They had given up on starting it I guess. I saw a beat up Reddy heater in
the pile and they told me just to take it for helping them out. What a deal! OK, on to the Reddy heater...

The Reddy heater was pretty much abused and my original thought was to dissect it for parts. The tank was pretty bashed.
Just for fun, I thought I would plug it in for a bit of diagnostic work. It's an older one which suited me just fine since it had
just a spark plug for fire and no circuit board to burn out rendering it to a piece of junk. It had spark but no fuel was
evident. As it turned out, the plastic filter plate had a crack in it so there was no air getting to the nozzle. I bypassed the
filter by putting the air hose directly on the air pump output and this cave man had fire! The unit was set aside for a few days
awaiting a new filter plate from E-Bay at a cost of about eight dollars. In the meantime, I disassembled the burner from the
fuel tank and proceeded to beat out the fuel tank deformities using the fuel cover hole to access the inside of the tank using a
three foot long rod an inch and a quarter in diameter that I had machined into a hammer face on the end.

After the part arrived, I reassembled the unit and added some fuel for a test run. Yes!! Lots of fire and brimstone!
Well, there really wasn't any brimstone but it sounded right at the time. Brimstone is another name for sulfur found on the
shores of the dead sea.

The final assembly required some sort of filter in the fuel line. There were a few parts missing likely due to the previous
owner trying to determine why there was no fire. I thought of a gas line filter but thought that might be too restrictive so I
resorted to fabricobulating a filter out of some fine screen on the end of a 5/16 diameter piece of copper pipe. I used a small
soldering iron on the copper weave and a propane torch to attach the screen to the pipe.
It's a pretty fine screen so I stiffened up the top part of it with some electronics solder.



And here it is working just fine. The best part was that the person that discarded the heater left a few gallons of fuel in it. Of course
I had to remove the fuel, filter it and reintroduce it into the tank.




At this time, I would like to congratulate everyone who read through all this verbiage.

 

[C-Bag]

“fabricobulating“

LOL! That has been added to the vernacular!

I miss the days of having a real scrap yard around. The one I grew up around was Ace Surplus, like 20ac of all kinda stuff! Just the place for a junkyard dawg like myself. People toss the craziest stuff. Now around here they try to sell stuff that really is really only good for the scrapyard.

 

[RJSakowski]

Brimstone was also mined in southwest Louisiana. The process was called the Frasch process and consisted of sending superheated steam down the outer of two concentric pipes that extended into the sulfur bed. The steam melted the sulfur and the pressure forced the molten sulfur to the surface through the central pipe.

Some forty years ago, I bought some 3-1/2" pipe from a freind who had a welding shop. The pipe had come from a drive in movie theater. When I was welding the pipe, I got the distinctive smell of sulfur dioxide. Examining the inside of the pipe, the rements of sulfur were very visible. Apparently when the theater had been built, they used second hand pipe salvaged from the defunct sulfur mines in Louisiana.

Fun fact: At one time, mines in SW Louisiana produced more sulfur than all of the rest of the world.

 

[Liljoebrshooter]

I have that exact same heater. I don't use it much anymore because of the smell. It still gets used to warm up my backhoe in the winter.
Nice job on the fix.

Joe

 

[mmcmdl]

My scrap place used to be the county landfill near me . I would always arrive with half a truck load of junk and leave with a full truck load . Years back they stopped allowing people to scavenge the pile . ( thank gawd ) or I would still be doing it .

 

[NortonDommi]

I had to do a Bing search for fabricobulating and was expecting something from the lexicon of Ave but this came up: https://www.bing.com/search?q=fabricobulating&PC=U316&FORM=CHROMN

 

[C-Bag]

I had to do a Bing search for fabricobulating and was expecting something from the lexicon of Ave but this came up: https://www.bing.com/search?q=fabricobulating&PC=U316&FORM=CHROMN

Is that self fulfilling definition?

 

[hman]

Sounds more like circular reasoning

 

[NortonDommi]

I suspect it may be a fabricobulation.