I’ve seen a lot of schemes put forth lately on “improving” the Babington burner. Some might be worthwhile,while others are probably not. There have been too many to catalog them. It was my intention to keep things simple, after all that’s the whole idea of this burner. Simplicity. I gave one good scheme for keeping a constant oil level ( for Babington testing and Turk burner experimenting ) and then I saw people attaching “jet engines, aircraft carriers and electron microscopes” to the idea in their attempts to “improve” it.

It is time for a pause in the action. At least mentally.

Today I am offering a scheme that just dawned on me today. Keep in mind that I have been fooling around with Babingtons for 25 or more years and that I am offering this idea because it is very good. It doesn’t need “improvement”, but I know damn good and well that there will be those of you out there who will not be able to resist making the idea “better”. And of course, so could I. But I choose not to. I choose simplicity over complexity. I fight with my inner self to “improve” things everyday. It is the constant battle that engineers the world over face daily.

The problem has been around for a while and is best stated as a question: “How can we control the amount of heat that we get from the Babington burner easily?”All that is required is a “screwdriver”. You just jab the flat blade of a screw driver into the fog near the jet. When you do this you prevent the fog from reaching the flame front. Only a portion of the oil is burned. Adjusting where this “blade” is gives you the desired control. The oil that hits the blade will drain off of it and go to the sump for recirculation.

So just put a flat piece of steel on a rod that passes through a sleeve that has a set screw on it. When you get it positioned where you want it, tighten the set screw to keep it there. Simple, effective, safe and needs no improvement. Unless of course you wish to have the rod’s position controlled by a bimetallic strip which would follow and control the room’s temperature, etc… If a sketch is required, I can provide one later for the “mechanically declined”.

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