Backyard Furnace...

I hope everyone had a nice christmas. My family and I sure did and I am glad it's over:).

Okay.. pick up where I lefted off. Finding the material to build something from scratch is sometimes challenging. Reasons are because usually the part or parts I need are not readily available so I have to build it with what I can find. My favorite places to find things are the junk yards or shops with left over parts (such as appliance repair shops, machanic shops, etc.).

So I go in somewhere and talk to the manager or owner of the shop and tell them point blank (or in a round about way if I don't want them to know what I'm building) what I need. Nine times out of ten I get lucky and they either give me a broken down something or give me a refurbished part for cheap. Then I haul whatever home and start cutting, tearing, unbolting, the one or so part I need for my project. I usually do this with many items to get the one thing I need for the overall project and this process takes me sometimes months. In the mean time I have jobs to do and family to tend and other life duties that comes first. I started my furnace about 1 1/2 months ago. The parts that I needed were a 55 gal drum, a 18" duct pipe, 5" pipe 1/2" thick, cement and some other items. Here are some pictures.



After I get some items I need then I get to work. This gets really tricky because I have to draw out what I want but I'm not drawing to scale or to measurements. I always draw a general picture of what I want then when I start building it I have to modify the objects to look like my picture. I should be percise and log everything I do but I usually don't and I'm constantly going back for measurements. After sawing, bending, twisting, cutting and lots of work I finally get some progress.




















Of course this all did'nt happen over night. This probably took me a week to do all this. I had to take the center pipe in to have someone cut the "U" out with a torch because I did'nt have such a tool. This gets really exciting when you start accomplishing something right out of a notebook and start seeing an actuall object. The next step is to mix concrete and fill in the gap between the barrel and the secong pipe. Before that I had to add a blower pipe at the bottom of the furnace so I can attache a blower on it to push air in to heat up the coals for the oven. Now I can add the cement.
























Some more pictures.

After seeing this I am getting more and more excited to move along but unfortunatly cement is on its own schedule and there is no hurry on this. I'll update you with more later.