27 Man
Member
Many a farmer has drained the crankcase of their tractors in front of their sheds to cut down on dust.
Popular Science 1963
- Thread starter Kevin J.
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I really miss Charlie's Hi-Lo. If I recall they got bought by O'Reilly. Hi-Lo was better.
CAJUNLAWYER
Member
Old trick is to use diesel instead of water when spraying 2,4-D along fence lines. I'm not gonna tell you how long ago I did this
Also I remember when building a brush pile to burn the recipe was "First you put down an old tire..."
Recycling: putting it back where it came from.
Alpo
Member
When I was a kid we would follow the mosquito truck on our bicycles. Riding in that big cloud. Malathion, not DDT. This would be the late 60s in Florida.
We still have the mosquito trucks running around the neighborhood, but you can barely see the cloud. And if anybody gets behind him he turns it off. If he passes a yard that there's people outside, he turns it off.
Times, they are a changing.
We still have the mosquito trucks running around the neighborhood, but you can barely see the cloud. And if anybody gets behind him he turns it off. If he passes a yard that there's people outside, he turns it off.
Times, they are a changing.
Alpo
Member
It's the theory of a French drain. The liquid goes through the gravel and it follows the individual rocks, which helps to spread the liquid out over a larger area. That lets the dirt absorb it better. If you just put it in a hole, you got a puddle.
The same reason that you would put gravel down on a muddy path. It makes the liquid spread out some, and the path isn't as soggy.
Many years ago my washing machine drained into my backyard. And every time I did a load of laundry I ended up with a puddle. Then someone told me about a French drain. I dug a trench and filled it half full of gravel, laid my drain hose on top of the gravel and covered it up with more gravel and then maybe an inch of dirt on top of it. Still drained, but I never had a wet spot anymore.
The mineral exploration industry was entirely uncontrolled through the 1980's. When drilling for oil or minerals through clay, the once dry clay was moistened by the drilling fluids. The clay swelled up in the borehole to the point the drill bit and drill string could not be extracted. Common practice was to dig a large hole, called a pit, and fill it with diesel fluid. Then pump the diesel fluid down and through the drill string and back to the surface. The diesel fuel would with 48 hours dissolve most clay "boots" and the drill sting and bit could be recovered. The diesel fuel was then pumped out onto the ground to evaporate. Most boot problems required 2,000 to 8,000 gallons of diesel. Besides the surface contamination, depending on the borehole depth, the diesel also contaminated numerous water bearing zones for decades afterwards and required huge money to clean up.
Doesanyone remember buying re refined engine oil? We took ours to the parts place and they had a big drum that got collected by some company. we kept a bit of oil we painted on all the farm equipment that got shiny(plows discs etc. Heck oil filters didn't come on some cars and were an option on others. I had an acquaintance that had a 1970 something Monte Carlo that never chaned the oil in. Just added when needed. cheep oil too. 90,000 miles later he sold it...still running great....No....I did not buy it! Steelslayers idea of using on kindling is something I used so do
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I worked on drilling rigs in the 70s and 80s. Diesel was the least of the problem. Caustic soda, powdered asbestos, dichromates, formaldehyde. The holes also let salt water zones move up and the formations an infiltrate fresh water zones.
If they were productive they were cased which cements pipe in the ground to prevent cross flow, if no productive they were plugged by pumping in cement at certain levels. Just how reliable some crews were on counting the number of stand of pipe between plugs is a concern. Nobody was actually checking on us.
One rig I worked on had 3 398 cat motors, each oil change on each motor took 110 gallons, 2 55 gallon drums. Every 300 hour shut one down, drain the oil into to reserve pit and frill it back up. The reserve pit was a big plastic line pit about the size of a football field, maybe 15ft deep that ended up filled with waste drilling fluid, mud and oil.
DWalt
Member
At one time long ago, and in some places, used crankcase oil was cleaned up and resold as engine oil. I don't know how it was cleaned up, probably just filtered. I don't know what is done with used crankcase oil today. It may just be added to heating oil or used as bunker fuel. It is not considered to be hazardous waste so long as it has not been contaminated with something that is hazardous.
Ivan the Butcher
Member
Ever since Love Canal, all waste oil is "Evil"!
My first clean-up job was an old bearing factory. Since before WWII the quinch oil tanks leaked into the ground water until shut down in the late 80's early 90's. We extracted ground water, separated the water/oil, put the water in the septic sewer (with permit and for a fee) and sold the oil. We recovered somewhere around 300,000 gallons of oil. Several million gallons of water went to the treatment plant.
Then we tore out the foundations of the furnaces. These were where the bearings were heated and quenched. After the leaking below ground tanks quit being used, Above ground tanks were used (and monitored). The quinch oil from that time frame was contaminated with PCBs. To clean that up, we found a HazMat dump. It was $800 per ton +shipping to get rid of it. 26 tons per truck, 20 trucks a day, 34 days of shipping=17,680 tons X $800= $14,144,000 in dump fees. If our contamination had been "Toxic", The dump fees would have been $2000 a ton or $35,360,000 and twice as far with higher transportation fees.
When we were done, we were over a year ahead of schedule and many million dollars under budget! (I got a $25,000 bonus!) This was a Superfund site! Your tax dollars at work. The bearing company is still in business!! They just refused to clean up their mess! Eventually after many court battles, they will pay back all of the clean-up fees, fines, interest and penalties!
The EPA field guy told me that we were the 4th company to have officially "cleaned" this mass up. I don't know what happened to the guys that got paid for not doing it right.
Ivan
My first clean-up job was an old bearing factory. Since before WWII the quinch oil tanks leaked into the ground water until shut down in the late 80's early 90's. We extracted ground water, separated the water/oil, put the water in the septic sewer (with permit and for a fee) and sold the oil. We recovered somewhere around 300,000 gallons of oil. Several million gallons of water went to the treatment plant.
Then we tore out the foundations of the furnaces. These were where the bearings were heated and quenched. After the leaking below ground tanks quit being used, Above ground tanks were used (and monitored). The quinch oil from that time frame was contaminated with PCBs. To clean that up, we found a HazMat dump. It was $800 per ton +shipping to get rid of it. 26 tons per truck, 20 trucks a day, 34 days of shipping=17,680 tons X $800= $14,144,000 in dump fees. If our contamination had been "Toxic", The dump fees would have been $2000 a ton or $35,360,000 and twice as far with higher transportation fees.
When we were done, we were over a year ahead of schedule and many million dollars under budget! (I got a $25,000 bonus!) This was a Superfund site! Your tax dollars at work. The bearing company is still in business!! They just refused to clean up their mess! Eventually after many court battles, they will pay back all of the clean-up fees, fines, interest and penalties!
The EPA field guy told me that we were the 4th company to have officially "cleaned" this mass up. I don't know what happened to the guys that got paid for not doing it right.
Ivan
Reminds me of going up to Fox Lake (IL) as a kid. So many 2stroke outboards running (most were 25:1 mix in those days) that the whole lake was an oil slick. Needed to take a shower before we got into the car to get it off.
Yet I'm still here.
Yet I'm still here.
How on earth did we survive childhood, never mind make it to 60-ish and beyond?My parents had a cottage on Lake St Clair in Michigan when I was growing up. It was on a small peninsula with a gravel road. A big truck would come down and spread used motor oil to keep the dust down. We were glad to see it! The cottage also had asbestous siding.
I also played with a Bayer Aspirin bottle filled with mercury when I was a young and have eaten a lot fish caught in the Great Lakes.
I'm not dead yet and I still smoke and have a few drinks in the evening!
Life is short, do what you gotta do...
I had a guy worked with 35 years ago with a 71 or so Nova,...It smoked like a freight train. Every day when he stopped at a gas station, (back then they all had service bays), he would ask for burned oil. He would fill his crankcase with oil that was from other people's oil changes and he drove the car the entire two years I worked there.
kev74
Member
My dad used to dump the old motor oil in the grass outside the side garage door. After he stopped, the grass grew back nicely.
I remember using pieces of asbestos siding as chalk to draw in the streets, too. Good times!
I remember using pieces of asbestos siding as chalk to draw in the streets, too. Good times!
I wouldn't pour used oil down a hole into the ground. It's easier to just park over a storm sewer and let it drain to wherever.
Our cottage up in Crawford County, PA, had a dirt road. I think it still is. They would spray salt water on the road to keep the dust down, maybe 2-3 times a summer. I guess the salt attracted moisture from the air. Our shallow well for the place was piped from about 5 yards from the road.
My friend (RIP) was a heavy equipment mechanic and they used all the old oil for the waste oil burning furnaces. It was a big building, obviously, and he said they never failed and the bldg. was warm.
Our cottage up in Crawford County, PA, had a dirt road. I think it still is. They would spray salt water on the road to keep the dust down, maybe 2-3 times a summer. I guess the salt attracted moisture from the air. Our shallow well for the place was piped from about 5 yards from the road.
My friend (RIP) was a heavy equipment mechanic and they used all the old oil for the waste oil burning furnaces. It was a big building, obviously, and he said they never failed and the bldg. was warm.
I worked at an airport in the FD. When they had fuel spills we went to the scene and used an old John Bean High Pressure pumper to wash the fuel into the grass. They spilled as much as 5000 gallons of different fuels at a time.... Jet A Av Gas JP-4 military. Other fuels too. Then there were the fuel tanks at the fuel farm. They had test wells at the fuel farm. There was a small pond on the property that actually caught fire. The EPA got involved. There was approx 8 ft of fuel on top of the water table. It took about 6 years to pump it all out separate and clean it up. We used thousands of gallons of the separated fuel in our EPA approved fire pit for training. We had, I think, the only approved liquid fuel training pit on the east coast at the time
You're kidding, right?
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