oil burning shop stoves.

Anyone out there have plans, suggestions or web sites for making a waste oil stove.
I saw one when I was in high school made out of a 50 gal. drum, some pipes cut in half and ????? If I remember right it worked sorta' like a big oil lamp. The oil was slowly let in by means of a gate valve and then trickled through a zig zag of half pipes (these were lit). The half pipes ran through the barrel almost like a steam boiler. A stove pipe on the top let out the soot and smoke.
Anyone made something like this or have one?

For examples and plans try looking on Mother Earth News' site. I modified my wood stove two winters ago with my design of the forced draft version. My stove is about 3 feet square and 3 feet tall, made out of 3/8" plate, and has an 8 inch stack pipe. I had the dripper putting the oil into a burner chamber made out of a piece of 6 inch, heavy wall stainless pipe about 8 inches tall. The forced draft was directed down into the chamber with a piece of 2 inch stainless pipe drawing off of the chamber that also put the actually heated air through the tubes in the top of the stove.

A couple of things I did to make mine as safe as possible was to feed it with a one gallon tank, and to make the burner chamber large enough to handle a full gallon should anything ever happen.....and it did, twice. I also put a flapper valve in the forced draft line that was set up so all I had to do was tap it and gravity would drop it down cutting off the air flow. With those two design elements in place it was about as safe as I could get it since it could never run over into the floor, and shutting off the air turned a roaring blaze into a small, smoky fire. The downside was I had to fill the tank every hour, or sometimes less, to keep the fire going.

With all of that said, a good fire in mine would get the skin temp on the stove to over 650 degrees, as measured by my Raytek infrared thermometer. Aimed at fire itself it blanked the screen at over 850 degrees. With the stove that hot I could get my 30 wide x 40 long x 10 high, uninsulated shop to a shirt sleeve comfortable temp with it below freezing outside. The problem was that anything within about 4 to 6 feet of it would get too hot to touch. I finally stopped using it when the oil in the tank got hot and'turned to water' one night and filled the burner chamber causing rosettes of flame to shoot out the draft openings on the door. I'll never know how hot it actually got that night but it warped the door about 1/2 in the middle.


Maybe I just designed it too well, or not well enough, I don't know which because it did it's job OH SO well.......Either way I knew with that kind of heat being produced it simply wasn't worth the risk to me to keep using it like it was. I survived the rest of the winter with a 100,000 BTU electric heater, that was originally in my house, supplimenting an old 30,000 BTU, keroseen, jet heater.

With all of that said, the best thing to do with waste oil is to get a waste oil furnace and do it right. That way if your shop ever burns down the insurance can't complain because they are UL listed, and have all the same safeyt devices, etc that any normal household furnace will have.