lawlessman, sounds good info
would be nice if someone posted their projects made from scrap. I think someone showed a spot welder they made entirely from a microwave
I would love to show you pix of some of the things we made around my shop from scrounged stuff, but all of it is long gone. I thought I'd share a story of a "
scrounge gone wrong" for a little morning laugh. Back in the mid-80's, my wife and my mother saved and scrimped to buy a swimming pool that came in a box. We set it up and filled it ourselves. In order to fill it, we pumped water out of a small pond. The water in the pond came from springs and "seepage" and was "bloody cold". We used a utility pump to pump the water into an empty 300 gallon oil tank set up on blocks on top of a utility trailer so it would be high enough to siphon into the pool. The more we filled the pool, the more full the oil tank had to be to make the siphon work. Being in the northeast, our swimming season is short enough as it is, so my Dad came up with an idea to heat the water. Back in the day, the local scrapyard would let you wander around and salvage stuff and then they'd sell it to you cheap. So, we went there and found a huge old water heater - must have been 50 gallons at least. The outer shell and insulation was already gone, so we pretty much had the tank left, which we bought for all of $5.00 and took home. We had a supply of scrounged bricks that my Dad had saved to someday build a barbecue, so we built a supporting structure for the tank that had the outlet end elevated about a foot above the inlet end. We ran some salvaged iron pipe from both fittings a couple feet, then connected flexible pool hose. The plan was to take water out of the pool from an adjustable diverter after the pump, run it through the wood fired heater and feed it back to the pool to the fisheye. Sounds reasonable, right? Imagine, spending all your spare time in the spring cutting and splitting and stacking wood (we used smaller wood that was too small to be of use in our wood burning furnaces), then spending time that you could be in the pool, building and tending a wood fire to heat the water for the pool that you don't have time to swim in because you are tending the )&(%*&%$^*%#$^% fire. Then add in hauling away ashes and constantly repairing the brickwork, which Dad conveniently left un-mortered, so they could be re-used, don't you know, plus the huge amount of heat the fire threw off and the smoke and..... well, I think you get the picture. The final determination was that for every 12 hours we kept a hot fire going under the boiler, we raised the pool temperature about 1 degree. A hot sunny day could raise the pool temp 3-4 degrees, so we finally threw in the towel, and the shovel, the axe and the hoe and took the tank back to the scrapyard where it belonged in the first place. A few years later, we salvaged some black plastic pipe which we laid in overlapping loops on the roof of a garage and used a salvaged pool pump to circulate pool water thru the pipe to actually heat the pool water with sunlight and heat reflected off the roof. It worked a lot better than the tank heater and didn't require a fire in July.
Footnote, the pile of bricks that my Dad had cared for so much sat in the exact same spot for 20 years and the brick barbecue never got built. I guess he never found the right pieces for it, 'cause he hated to buy stuff new.
Another footnote - when it came time to fill our pool, we had heard that some places hauled water to fill pools. We called around only to find that a enough truckloads of river water to fill our pool would cost more than we had paid for the pool itself. The funniest reply we got was from one place we called - when we told them we'd like to get water to fill our pool, they asked "You want that delivered?" And they were serious.
