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Very nice looking setup. Are you planning some sort of cross country trip where you will need to process on the road or do you just store your 'filtration station' in the trailer?
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Thanks, I live in a rental duplex so I am just using the snowmobile trailer as my pickup and processing station. Local biodiesel guy sells me the raw oil so I strap the drums down and go pick up 275 gallons at a wack from him.
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What type tubing did you use? Aircraft alum. from Aircraft Spruce? Very nice bends, too.
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The tubing for my tank heat exchanger is 1/2 aircraft tubing, first shot at bending tubing. Below is the post that I made detailing the trails and errors, Enjoy!
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Hi Everyone
Well I finally got my tank finished to go with FN74’s Vegistroke WVO setup. A little detailed so maybe take it as a cautionary warning (grin)!
I got the tank at a wreaking yard that specializes in pickup trucks; it had come out of a motor home. Not something they normally have a call for so was able to get it for $60.00 which is appropriate as it’s a 60 gal tank. (Throw them a sob story that it’s just raw material and you have to do a lot of work to do it to make it useful).
After that it proceeded to get expensive as I wanted aluminum tubing in the tank after reading some posts of yuck and corrosion with copper tubing.
I have a good friend who scratch builds airplanes to race at Reno I enlisted him to direct me in my efforts. So after figuring out the parts that I needed with his help I headed off to the aircraft supply store and 200 some odd dollars later walked with a bag of parts and two twelve foot sticks of half inch aircraft tubing. Should have order the stuff online and just got the tubing at the local shop.
The tank has three chambers, so I elected to only heat the one next to the fuel pickup. Here’s a photo of the tank with the access hole cut in it.
<font color="blue">Tank with access hole </font>
The real fun came drilling out all the holes for the domed nut plates. A nut plate about every inch and half, so thirty nut plates with three holes per. They have nifty little tool to get the holes just right, but its really tense holding it just so, forearms were really hurting when I got done. Then counter sink drilling for flush rivets and drilling out the bolt hole and riveting in the nut plates. The riveting part went really fast!
Here’s a picture from the back side of the nut plates riveted in place. They have domes over them to keep the liquid from seeping up or down the treads.
<font color="blue">Backside view of nut plates </font>
Next came the fun part of bending the aluminum tubing, you start bending a twelve foot length of tubing with a hand tool, hey Fred don’t hit the airplane again! The design was to have two sections that would interleave into each other like interlaced fingers.
Each series of loops had a total length minus a couple inches of the slant distance between the far edge of the access hole and the inter partition minus an inch. It was fairly easy to move the formed tubing back and forth to snake it in to the access hold.
<font color="blue">Picture of a couple loops interlaced </font>
The plan was to alternate 180 degree bends with a couple of 90 degree bends with a spacer gap so that the return run would nestle or interleave together. Half inch tubing so let’s add an inch between the 90 degree bends should have made it an inch and half!
<font color="blue">Another view of the nested tubing </font>
Of course I was concentrating on making the bends perfectly and didn’t plan ahead enough on how and when to turn it back around and start the next stick of tubing!
<font color="blue">Here's the ugly but functional results </font>
I guess I should have redone it, but the tubing was almost $3.00 a foot and sixty mile drive to get some more.
Here’s final picture inside the tank of the tubing joining the through hole fittings.
<font color="blue">Fittings </font>
And here’s a picture of tanks finished, still haven’t hooked up the Tank to my WVO line as I haven’t gotten my first load of WVO yet. Had a slight leaking problem with the union in the tank, exacerbated by the fact that in my open end wrenches purchased at Costco the 7/8 inch wrench wasn’t a 7/8 inch wrench!
Here’s a final picture of the WVO heater lines and the filler tube.
<font color="blue">Heater and filler fittings </font>
Ok if I had it to do over again?
Well after doing this I won’t be so hesitant to help someone with aircraft construction LOL!
Though seriously the hole was big enough I could have just thrown in a transmission cooler like other posters have done or heck just used copper tubing covered in an epoxy paint coating.
It done!
Fred
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