Mother's Waste Oil Heater

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In the second, MOTHER's furnace pours out all that heat while merely sipping its fuel (when adjusted for maximum efficiency, the unit consumes less than one quart of oil an hour . . . as opposed to the one-third gallon (or more!) that a comparably sized (and very expensive!) commercial fuel oil burner drank when our researchers tested it against MOTHER's stove.

And in the third place, MOTHER's furnace was designed to operate on "free for the hauling" waste crankcase oil! It's little wonder, then, that we figure our little gem can pay back its modest initial cost in less than two weeks. And, after that, it operates absolutely free!

THERE'S A REASON FOR THIS EFFICIENCY

It's not easy to come up with that kind of economy, of course, in this day and age . . . unless you really work at it. Which is exactly what MOTHER's researchers have done.

MOTHER's waste oil burner has been under development for months, and the stove you see here is a "sixth generation" of our original design. Quite frankly: If there's a simpler, easier to build, more economical, or more efficient way to [1] recycle used motor oil Into [2] free heat for the coming winter . . . we'd like to know about it. There may well be, of course . . but until someone shows into us, we believe that MOTHER's "bolt it together in one day from $36 worth of materials and then run it on no-cost fuel" furnace is just about the ultimate way you're going to find to keep warm during the cold months ahead.

Thurmalox 270 is an Amazing Paint!

It's true that the boys down in MOTHER'S Research Center worked long and hard to develop the super-simple and super-efficient waste oil burner described in the accompanying article. And some of the folks up here in MOTHER'S editorial offices think the magazine's research team even may have worked a little longer than necessary ... simply because they dreaded facing a problem they knew—sooner or later—they'd have to face: What would they paint the stove with once it was finished?

As MOTHER'S shop crew knows only too well, the answer to that particular question ain't at all easy to come by. Dennis Burkholder, especially, has slapped more coats of more different kinds and brands and formulations of "guaranteed, heat-resistant, new, improved, space-age, (and expensive)" paint on more test stoves—and then watched it all burn off the first time those furnaces or heaters were fired up—than he cares to remember.

In short: An awful lot of companies now market a bewildering variety of "heat-resistant" (whatever that means) paints that—for all practical purposes—aren't really worth dipping a brush into.

It is easy to understand, then, why Dennis or someone else down at the research lab merely set the spray can of Thurmalox 270—another of those "heat-resistant" (whatever that means) paints —up on a shelf untested when it came in some time ago. Obviously there was no reason to give it a special test. Obviously it'd simply prove to be a disappointment just like ail the rest of the "heat-resistant" (whatever that means) paints that had failed in the past.

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