From: John De Armond
Newsgroups: misc.rural
Subject: Re: Dear John
Date: Mon, 26 Dec 2005 19:12:15 -0500
Message-ID: <ed11r11tibc613hfcavt2s9craka9eq6o6@4ax.com>

On Mon, 26 Dec 2005 17:08:00 GMT, Larry Caldwell <larryc@teleport.com>
wrote:


>It's one of the little miracles of life.  When you heat an object, it
>expands as if it were a solid block of that material.  If you heat a nut
>washer, for instance, the hole in the washer expands just as if it were
>made out of steel.  You might think the hole would get smaller because
>the steel is expanding, but the opposite is true.  The same phenomenon
>is why you can loosen a nut by heating it.  If the nut gets hotter than
>the bolt, the hole will expand faster than the bolt.
>
>In the case of a pan of oil, I don't know if the oil has a larger
>coefficient of expansion than the pan material.  If the coefficient of
>expansion is smaller than the pan material, the oil will never spill.
>If the coefficient of expansion of the oil is larger than the pan
>material, the oil will expand faster than the pot, and may spill if the
>pot is too full.

The coefficient of expansion of oil is quite large.  The level in my
50# deep fryer goes up over an inch from room temperature to the 375
deg setpoint I use.  Turkey fryers are even worse because of the tall,
narrow diameter shape.

At the low temperature involved in double boilering, the oil just
sorta dribbles out and the fire isn't spectacular, nothing like
spilling water into a deep fryer.  BTDT more than once.  In my
restaurant kitchen with the excellent 10 ft ceiling mounted smoke
hood, I just let it burn out.  In my domestic kitchen in my cabin, I
pay a little more attention because the hood is too damned close to
the stove and the flames could be sucked up into the stack.

John