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If you have followed some of the projects that I've posted in this blog, you may have  seen the vegetable oil heating system that I've posted on a few times. This project is one that I make improvements to every year.
This year, the improvement I wanted to make was to the air  pump. The air pump is a rotary vane design, and is run by the motor of the oil burner where the oil pump would normally go. My previous air pump worked, but I found that it would wear at an abnormally high rate and eventually it would put groves into the metal pump parts and the pressure would drop too low to run the system.
The problem is that the shaft was not in perfect alignment; since I didn't have the  proper equipment to make the parts I needed when I first built the heating system, I did the best with what I had. Now  that a year has past, I have since acquired a metal lathe and a metal milling machine. With these new tools I would be able to make the parts with the precision I needed, and that is what I did.
If you read about the oil burner before, you know I designed the pump to use carbon vanes that you can buy in most hardware stores meant as replacements for kerosene tube heaters. My new pump is the same design, but now I can make the exact shapes I need; this capability allowed me to design the new pump to bolt into place of the oil pump.
Since I made the new air pump, it has been installed on the  burner and has run for  many hours. The pictures of the air pump are of the pump after running for about 10 hours, when I dissembled the pump to determine how fast it was wearing. I am happy to say that so far I can not detect any wear in the metal parts, and the pressure and flow has remained steady.
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