oil

19 Articles

Scrapyard Vacuum Dehydrator Sucks The Water From Hydraulic Oil

February 16, 2025 by 23 Comments

Anyone who has ever had the misfortune of a blown head gasket knows that the old saying “oil and water don’t mix” is only partially true. When what’s coming out of the drain plug looks like a mocha latte, you know you’re about to have a very bad day.

[SpankRanch Garage] recently found himself in such a situation, and the result was this clever vacuum dehydrator, which he used to clean a huge amount of contaminated hydraulic fluid from some heavy equipment. The machine is made from a retired gas cylinder welded to a steel frame with the neck pointing down. He added a fill port to the bottom (now top) of the tank; as an aside, we had no idea the steel on those tanks was so thick. The side of the tank was drilled and threaded for things like pressure and temperature gauges as well as sight glasses to monitor the process and most importantly, a fitting for a vacuum pump. Some valves and a filter were added to the outlet, and a band heater was wrapped around the tank.

To process the contaminated oil, [Spank] glugged a bucket of forbidden milkshake into the chamber and pulled a vacuum. The low pressure lets the relatively gentle heat boil off the water without cooking the oil too badly. It took him a couple of hours to treat a 10-gallon batch, but the results were pretty stark. The treated oil looked far better than the starting material, and while it still may have some water in it, it’s probably just fine for excavator use now. The downside is that the vacuum pump oil gets contaminated with water vapor, but that’s far easier and cheaper to replace that a couple hundred gallons of hydraulic oil.

Never doubt the hacking abilities of farmers. Getting things done with what’s on hand is a big part of farm life, be it building a mower from scrap or tapping the power of the wind.

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Unconventional Oil Production, All You Need To Know

December 5, 2024 by 48 Comments

It’s fair to say that climate change is perhaps the greatest challenge facing our planet, and while much attention is directed towards solutions to the problems it presents, perhaps there’s less attention given to the the other side of the equation in the hydrocarbon industry. For example we all think we know something about hydraulic fracking wells, but how much do we really know?

[John Thurmond] is a geologist who has recently completed a long career in the oil industry, and he gave an informative talk on the matter at the summer’s EMF Camp in the UK. It makes for an interesting watch, as he leads the viewer through the process in detail, before discussing what should and shouldn’t cause worry.

We learn that fracking has two parts: first the hydraulic fracking itself, and then the re-injection of the toxic fracking well water released from underground along with the oil or gas. It seems the water released from the rocks a 10,000 ft depth contains all manner of toxic and even radioactive compounds, and the usual means of disposal is to inject it back into the ground at a much lower depth. He makes the point that while the hazards associated with the fracking are low, those of the re-injection are high.

The talk finishes up with perhaps the most interesting point, by looking at the nature of opposition to fracking, or indeed any other controversial development. Such things are inevitably surrounded by a swirling mess of half-truths, and his point is that identifying those easily deflected as not true is key to understanding the whole thing. It’s presented from an expert and factual perspective that’s so often lacking in this arena, and thus we think it’s worth a watch.

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Big Chemistry: Synthetic Oil

May 2, 2022 by 49 Comments

For as long as I’ve been driving, I’ve been changing oil. Longer than that, actually — before I even got my license, I did a lot of the maintenance and repair work on the family car. It seemed natural to do it back then, and it continues today, despite the fact that it would probably be cheaper overall to farm the job out. I keep doing it mainly because I like keeping in touch with what’s going on with my cars.

Oil changes require supplies, but the last few times I made the trip to BigBoxMart I came back empty-handed. I don’t know whether it’s one of the seemingly endless supply chain problems or something else, but the aisle that usually has an abundance of oil was severely understocked. And what was there was mostly synthetic oil, which I’ve never tried before.

I’ve resisted the move to synthetic motor oil because it just seemed like a gimmick to relieve me of more of my hard-earned money than necessary. But now that it seems like I might have little choice but to use synthetic oil, I thought I’d do what normally do: look into the details of synthetic oils, and share what I’ve found with all of you.

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Twin jet engines mounted on tank treads

Big Wind Is The Meanest Firefighting Tank You Ever Saw

December 6, 2021 by 79 Comments

As the Iraqi army retreated at the end of the first Gulf War, they took the term “scorched Earth policy” quite literally. Kuwaiti oil wells were set alight en masse, creating towering infernos that blackened the sky.

As it turns out, extinguishing a burning oil well is no easy feat. In the face of this environmental disaster, however, a firefighting team from Hungary made a name for themselves out on the desert sands, astride a jet-engined tank named Big Wind.

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Flip dot display submerged in oil

Giving Flip Dots The Oil Treatment To Shut Them Up

November 30, 2021 by 20 Comments

Flip dot displays are awesome — too bad it’s so hard to find large panels to play around with, but that’s for another article. [Pierre Muth] has been working to find different and interesting things to do with these flip dots, and he recently explored how you can flip them very very gently.

Now you likely remember [Pierre’s] work from earlier this year where he was pushing the speed of the displays as high as possible. Using a capacitor discharge trick he made it to 30 fps, which absolutely stunning work. This time around he attempted to do something equally impressive by micro-stepping the dots. It’s a bonkers idea and unfortunately didn’t work. It seems the dots are engineered for two steady states and you just can’t get very good performance with the in-between states.

However, along the way he had an a-ha moment. Part of what he wanted to do with the microstepping was to slow down the change of the state and for that, he just grabbed a viscous fluid that’s thicker than air: Vaseline oil. (We’d imagine it’s not the cocoa-scented variety, but who knows?) He’s taken a page out of the mineral-oil-cooled PC sub-genre and applied it to flipdots. But watch the video after the break and you’ll see that the slower animations are super pleasing to watch, and the clickity-clackity that was driving you nuts while trying to works is now whisper quiet. It’s a new dawn for displays.

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Oil Wells Done Rube-Goldberg Style: Flatrods And Jerk Lines

May 1, 2020 by 30 Comments

The news is full of the record low oil price due to the COVID-19-related drop in demand. The benchmark Brent crude dipped below $20 a barrel, while West Texas intermediate entered negative pricing. We’ve all become oil market watchers overnight, and for some of us that’s led down a rabbit hole of browsing to learn a bit about how oil is extracted.

Many of us will have seen offshore oil platforms or nodding pumpjacks, but how many of us outside the industry have much more than a very superficial knowledge of it? Of all the various technologies to provide enlightenment of the curious technologist there’s one curious survivor from the earliest days of the industry that is definitely worth investigation, the jerk line oil well pump. This is a means of powering a reciprocating pump in an oil well not through an individual engine or motor as in the pump jacks, but in a system of rods transmitting power over long distances from a central location by means of reciprocating motion. It’s gloriously simple, which has probably contributed to its survival in a few small-scale oil fields over a century and a half after its invention.

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A Look At Liquid Dielectrics

September 18, 2018 by 34 Comments

One evening quite a few years ago, as I was driving through my hometown I saw the telltale flashing lights of the local volunteer fire department ahead. I passed by a side road where all the activity was: a utility pole on fire. I could see smoke and flames shooting from the transformer and I could hear the loud, angry 60 Hz buzzing that sounded like a million hornet nests. As I passed, the transformer exploded and released a cloud of flaming liquid that rained down on the road and lawns underneath. It seemed like a good time to quit rubbernecking and beat it as fast as I could.

I knew at the time that the flaming liquid was transformer oil, but I never really knew what it was for or why it was in there. Oil is just one of many liquid dielectrics that are found in a lot of power distribution equipment, from those transformers on the pole to the big capacitors and switchgear in the local substation. Liquid dielectrics are interesting materials that are worth taking a look at.

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