This weekend I resumed work on the jet engine project. When I last left off I had just completed the frame and mounted the turbocharger/combustor. I had also fabricated an oil tank out of an old propane tank and mounted it under the turbo, but had hit a bit of a wall with what to do for an oil pump. There are electric oil pumps available, but basically all of them would be overkill for this application. Also, since this is a hobby I’d much rather put in the time to make something custom vs paying for parts. Turbocharger jet engines have been done by many others, my approach with this is to see how compact and well packaged I can make one – that doesn’t happen by bolting together a bunch of off-the-shelf parts.
I had considered using the bus’s old oil pump, but this created more problems than it solved (connection of inlet/output pipes would be a challenge as would driving it and selecting a motor). Today after a taking a fresh look at it I realized that an old 12V tire inflator pump that I had could be adapted to work. The plastic casing had broken, but the ‘guts’ were all metal and should hold up to oil pump duty. The only problem was that the cylinder head of the pump had no way of connecting an inlet pipe – being designed for air, it just drew in air from a small hole. To fix this, I made a new cylinder head on the lathe with one large hole in the center. A tee fitting screws into the head and I’ll put a check valve on each side. This larger single-hole head should also help compensate for the increased load of pumping oil, much thicker than air. Once I start running oil through it I may have to make some tweaks to avoid overload (lower voltage, thin oil, etc) but this at least gives a path forward for experimentation.
I also shortened the oil tank to make more room underneath for other support systems and made a threaded port on the lathe to weld into the tank to connect the oil pump. The welds aren’t the greatest looking, but are leak-free and that’s what matters – they should clean up OK after some grinding. For now the whole project is in fabrication mode, but once everything is in place and working I’ll go back and do body/paint work on all the parts to make it look nice too.
