Yes those HF washers are fairly cheap but I live overseas and there are no HF stores over here...

I see the cut-in-half-barrel washer has been built before, but I'm surprised that some of you don't use a filter, I don't trust the dirt-will-sink-to-the-bottom approach and want to filter the fluid before leading it back into the tank.

Using diesel would be worth a try, it's about 1.75 a litre, the dedicated cleaners are 3-4 bucks a litre (cheapest offer I found so far).

Regards
Martin

My filter is simple but it works well. I suspended a bowl under the drain. The drain has a piece of screen wire doubled over in it. The bowl catches any thing else heavy that might make it through. The fluid just continually overflows the bowl and the heavy stuff fall to the bottom of the bowl. Makes it quieter too. I also have my pump a 1/2" off the bottom of the tank.

I thought about sinking a VW Beetle oil screen in the barrel & picking up the fluid from the middle of the screen, just like a VW oil pump does, then pumping it through a large inline fuel filter like fuel-injected Fords use. This is purely theoritical, I haven't tried it yet.

In the meantime the washer is nearly finished, see how it turned out in the pics below. Sorry they're not very good quality as my digital camera is only a cheap one.





The pump is a fuel pump from a Saab 9000 (my garage neighbour is a Saab crack and removed it just because it has run a quarter million km, but it's working fine). The transformer was rescued from trash, was from a low voltage lighting system and delivers 5A at 12V. There's a rectifier located behind the on/off switch because the transformer delivers ac.

At the moment there's diesel inside. The fluid passes a screen when flowing off the half barrel, and at the bottom of the pump pickup there is a normal fuel filter as used on motorcyles and the like.

Regards
Martin

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that's a nice job... I'd take one of those over HF any day of the week.

Ain't it a bit....tall? I assume the top part sits to one side of the barrell, right?