Mikey98118

I also recommend high alumina kiln shelves in tube forges, where they are suspended in the shell, with only ceramic blanket underneath. Part of the reason for using a shelve is its strength, which is needed for a suspended ceramic part. In a box shaped forge, the floor rests directly on the forge bottom, or on a ceramic board, which in term lies on the forge bottom. So, the part will be completely supported. In this case the money is better spent by purchasing Kast-O-lite 30 refractory from Wayne. In an oval or "D" forge, where ceramic board is best used as floor insulation, I would choose high alumina refractory for the hot-face.

I would say it is about average. I get my high alumina shelves from Seattle Pottery supply, since they are in my town and have reasonable prices. But in the case of replacing the brick floor of a Diamondback forge, I wouldn't go with the shelve...moment of shock and surprise; Mikey would use something other than a high alumina kiln shelve for a floor1?! Yes; in this instance, I would go with an even better insulating high alumina castable (Kast-O-lite 30) From Wayne. I recommend high alumina kiln shelves in tube forges, where they are suspended in the shell, with only ceramic blanket underneath. Part of the reason for using an HA shelf is its strength, which is needed for a suspended ceramic part. You will put the floor directly on the forge bottom, or on a ceramic board, which in term lies on the forge bottom. So, the part will be completely supported. In this case you will save construction money, and fuel by purchasing castable from Wayne. Box forges have different needs than tube forges Are you going to tell us what "On-Line Store for High Alumina Shelving" so the rest of us can have a look see?

Perlite is going to melt at typical forge temperatures, and so will sodium silicate; this combination is only used as secondary insulation. A mixture of Perlite and furnace cement will last longer, but will also fail. Ceramic wool blanket is normally what is used in coffee-can forges. The blanket is also rigidized with fumed silica and given a tough sealing coat.

High alumina kiln shelves High alumina kiln shelves are hard to beat for external baffle walls, and for internal movable walls; They only get tougher at incandescent temperatures. The kind of small round kiln shelves you might want to build either structure from is economical, and much of the work is already done for you. High alumina kiln shelves are seven times more insulating than clay based hard brick. Cheap carbide or diamond coated, burrs, blades, and hole saws from Harbor Freight Tools and eBay make drilling, cutting, and grinding on them nearly as simple as working in metal. So, a round kiln shelf can be mounted on home made hinges, given a latch and a small opening to shove parts through, and made to serve as the perfect baffle wall, allowing you to heat bulky shapes, like hammers, or crucibles at will. Or the shelf can be trapped in three short angles that are mounted to the forge shell, so that baffles with various openings can be changed out, accommodating different work pieces with minimal openings for maximum radiant reflection. A less obvious but just as useful feature of high alumina is that it provides a tough supporting surface for stabilized zirconia flour/bentonite clay based heat reflective coatings. I consider hard fire brick as useful for temporary baffle walls, allowing the forge to work at bending parts for permanent upgrades of add-on structures.

High alumina kiln shelf is hard to beat for external baffle walls, and for internal movable walls.

Good info there. What went wrong the the coffee-can forges; problems making burners small enough? Or where they just too small to do what you wanted? I am still interested in them.

Nice job so far. Do you plan to make an internal movable wall, so you can just run one burner, whenever you don't need all that space?

What marketplace? The market for threaded pipe fittings. Part quality has gradually gotten so bad, that I would rather design from tube.

the title is Gas Burners for Forges, Furnaces, & Kilns. A couple of the guys recently asked my permission to post wholesale from the book, on this group. I encouraged them to go right on ahead and do so. I am about to retire the book from further publication. My knowledge on burners has moved on, and so has the marketplace. I consider the material too dated to be worth revising. I will save some chapters in other books, but will not bother with these burners anymore.

So, more is better, right? If that was so, reducer fittings would make perfect flame nozzles; they don't because the nozzle diameter needs to match up well with the mixture flow to work properly. If you attempt to run a burner out in the open air with no nozzle at all, the flame cannot be maintained. Screw on a reducer fitting, and the same burner runs. However, the reducer always ends up having too large an opening diameter to get the best flame possible from the burner. So, a reducer fitting ends up better than nothing at all, but far short of optimal. Going back to the previous discussion of tapered and stepped nozzles, we we that the same nozzle diameters on different nozzle shapes can make quite a lot of difference. Shaped nozzles simply create more drag on the mixture flow than tapered nozzles do; whether that is good or bad depends on how fast your burner's mixture flow is. There are burners that can support more than one nozzle diameter. There are burners with ceramic multiple flame nozzles. Blue flame pocket lighters and had torches have nozzles that can make needle flames. I glance at a list of oxy-fuel torch tips will show a variety of shapes, which make various flames. The only limit is that the flame nozzle has to match the character of the burner's or torch's output; that is a guessing game. The more you know the less guesses are required to meet your needs Shaped nozzles simply create more drag on the mixture flow than tapered nozzles do? That should have read Stepped nozzles.

Given correct gas and air inflow, flame nozzle diameter determines the limit of a burner’s maximum output, because a flame cannot be maintained at the nozzle beyond the limits of its ability to be anchored there by the nozzle’s low pressure area. The tendency of a flame to blow completely off its nozzle is balanced by the countering push provided by ambient air pressure (equally from all directions except the area of reduced pressure inside the nozzle opening; behind the flame); this forms a delicate balance; increasing any flame beyond the low pressure area’s ability to hold it on (or partially within) the flame nozzle will lead to complete destabilization. It is a well-established fact that burners without any nozzle at all can operate well enough if properly positioned in forges and furnaces of a compatible size (too small an interior and the furnace or forge becomes a flame thrower; too large and a stable flame cannot be maintained). While this may seem to contradict previous statements, it is merely a case of “apples and oranges” because, sans nozzle, the furnace or forge interior becomes (in effect) the burner nozzle. So, why bother with a flame nozzle’s balancing act when you can just stuff the burner’s mixing tube directly into most heating equipment? Well, some people don’t bother. Let’s try a different question: Why drive a Ferrari when you can purchase a beat up old farm truck pretty cheap? A complete burner, flame nozzle included, gives you better flame control, so that the heating equipment it’s placed in only refines the flame still further. The smaller your equipment the more important flame control becomes (helping keep the flame burning inside the forge or furnace instead of overheating your work space). But, the larger your equipment the more full flame control saves in fuel costs, because complete combustion within a few inches of the burner entrance port means better heat transfer before its spent gases exit through the equipment’s exhaust opening.

Please forgive my error. We have Tom to thank; not Tim

Anaerobic Sealants We have Tim to thank for using this term in another thread; it includes everything from gasket seal to thread sealer. He said: "Something I've not seen mentioned much is that using tape needs care and some skill. Whilst it's a long way from brain surgery and can be covered in a 10-minute show-and-do, I'm guessing most of the guys asking the tape or dope? question are doing so because they genuinely have no idea. They won't have had the 10-minutes of one-to-one instruction from someone who knows and are therefore probably best advised to use an anaerobic sealant, just because there is less chance of getting it wrong." Lots of us have used gas rated thread to seal our gas jets against those pesky leaks. Some have probably used pipe goop. My present answer is thread locker. John uses " yellow stuff". A word search under "anaerobic sealants" will give you more choices than you no what to do with. The main point is that, choosing one of these sealants is the easy path to avoiding gas leaks in threaded fittings.

Sometimes the adjustment is to substitute a different MIG tip, or to file the tip a few thousandths larger. I've only had to remove a tip for cleaning once in all these years, after a friend used a really cheap propane in his forge for three weeks. I unscrewed the tip and removed a hard sticky little ball of tar. Tim, Thank you for using the term " anaerobic sealant." I did a word search, and up popped the probable answer to a question I've been mulling over for years; what is that hard black part sealant used on so many torches? I now suspect it is thinned out gasket sealant. With a little luck I will be able to come up with the right solvent for it, and be able to disassemble imported torch parts at will!

There are other threads on here that get in to how to go about making a cast hot-face inner layer, surrounding it with ceramic blanket, and inserting the bundle into a forge shell. This makes occasional changing out the wool for a new layer about as easy at anything gets; build a hinged and latched door of the front of a tunnel forge, and it gets so easy there should be a law against it. Ceramic board is tougher than ceramic blanket, and will bast longer. You can build a box shaped forge, or buy a Diamondback forge, that not only lasts longer than wool, but is child's play to reline. The insulation in either forge should last a "weekend warrior " for years.

Everything always boils down to dealing with the obvious. I kept wondering why anyone would place a reducer on his/her burner, instead of making something as simple as a stepped nozzle. After all, it was right in my book, which is free on the Net, and I said so many times (including on this thread)? Wrong; people get confused and DISCOURAGED. Then they look for whatever method comes to mind. So I finally did the obvious and posted what they need to know here and now. That is the point of this thread, obviously. And it only took me three years to see that

No boojum in this rabbit hole. I have a propane burner that works very well, along with weeding, and Roundup. Trying to use propane burning to eliminate garden weeding in Seattle is a great way to eliminate excess money, while the weeds come right back. Burning, weeding, and poisoning is enough to keep my jungle in check at this time of year; just. then, there is pruning, and cutting down the fallen tree...and to think, this was originally my plan to eliminate lawn mowing. Now there was a clear case of boojum!!! Well, its off to work I go.

Burner bocks You don't think a guy that blabbed all about his previous burner series is going to keep this one under wraps do you? It's just that text won't cut it on these burners. There must be lots of pictures, and that means progress is limited to how much garage time I can manage. Ahead of garage time must come yard work in a garden that is rapidly turning into a jungle. I can either rack my old bones out there, or pay another $5000 to have a crew come in and make it right! So, figure on July before you see those photos. On the plus side, these burners are actually simple to build; just not simple to put into words. And, yes, they are a rabbit hole, because they will rewrite so much about burner function. Sorry Thomas, You will just have to settle for a rabbit hole burner. And, I've just set the time for me to "put up or shut up," haven't I?

the Ins & Outs of Basic Flame Nozzles Tapered flame nozzles are supposed to have a 1:12 (one to twelve) increase in area hammered into them; this works out to be about the same amount of distance as the wall thickness on a schedule #40 pipe, in approximately 1-1/2" of its length. Wow; not a lot of increase is it? How can this little bit possibly do so much to affect flame function? A tapered nozzle sets over (outside of) the burner's mixing tube, so that it can slide back and forth, thus changing the length to width ratio of the area of overhang of that nozzle, beyond the mixing tube. Is there a little itch in the back of your mind, about the preceding paragraph? Good; there should be, since I seem to have switched subjects in mid stream. That was done to illustrate a point, which is that people keep failing to include the thickness of the nozzle's wall in their calculations; it doubles the amount of increase in diameter, and therefore width, that the nozzle provides. S0 all you have to do to design a stepped nozzle is start by providing a spacer ring to run back and forth on the mixing tube. I used the next size schedule #40 pipe in my early burners. Chose a stainless steel pipe or tube that the spacer ring can rest inside of, and you now have the same increase in width that a tapered flame nozzle makes. What about nozzle length? You need to have enough length to allow the needed amount of overhang past the mixing tube. No matter what the mixing tube's diameter is, the proper amount of overhang will ALWAYS turn out to be a little over its inside diameter; usually between 1/16" and 1/8" more. So I add 1/4" to the nozzle's inside diameter for good measure; add to this length the width of the spacer ring, and you know how long to cut your nozzle. So, how wide do you want the spacer ring? Wide enough for it to help force the nozzle into alignment with the mixing tube. Wide enough to provide plenty of distance to place up to two circles of set screws with 1/2" between them, and still have 1/4" between the center of their holes and the edges of the spacer ring. In short a minimum of 1" wide, even on miniature burners; until you become familiar with the subject, that is a safe minimum width. There are some burners, which don't have a strong enough mixture flow, to support a stepped nozzle; in that case you must employ a tapered flame nozzle. There are other burners, like Frosty's "T" burners, which can develop very hot soft flames; on them a stepped nozzle could be considered counter productive. But, for most burner designs, a stepped nozzle is not just easier to build; it also increases flame heat. What about other nozzle designs? Flame nozzles are only limited by your imagination...and your experience; these two are tried and true designs to start from; there are many others. It is also a fact that, when placed in equipment, burners can function without a flame nozzle; just not as well as with one. However, no flame nozzle at all, will work better in heating equipment than a badly constructed one.

I think it varies quite a bit between designs. Linear burners don't seem to be bothered with minor gas leaks in this area, but Mikey burners will not tolerate the slighted leak.

You don't need an expensive drill press to work on a "T" burner. Look up Harbor Freight Tools, and look through their collection of tabletop drill presses. The secret to using them for general work is to combine their cheap press with their cheap step drills, and hole drills. You will do just fine. That should read hole saws...

It is no secret that I like step nozzles; they take a faster burner design than tapered nozzle, to work; but that happens to include most of the burners around since we started using MIG contact tips (and capillary tube) for gas jets. I started making stepped flame nozzles with my second burner, and never looked back; that was a mistake. Tapered nozzles still have their place, and so does Larry Zoeller.

That is a good question. Castable needs to be confined in some kind of form until it green cures, but that doesn't necessarily need to be a mold. You could rigidize the ceramic blanket in place and only use an inner form, such as Sonotube, or plastic pipe. On the other hand, you can reverse the process; building the inner face in a mold; flame cure it; wrap the insulation around it, with twine to keep it its diameter restricted. Heat will cut the twine, allowing the blanket to expand in the shell. But then, rigidizing the blanket gets harder to do. On the other hand, a superior hot face can be taken out of the insulation and wrapped with new insulation every couple of years. It all comes down to what you want most and what you are willing to give up for it.

You have seen recent photos that show how widely flames can vary from very small changes in flame nozzles. Also, mild steel will oxidize away in very little time. So, trying to make tapered nozzles when you can buy good quality at a low price, is silly economics. The more I see guys reinventing the wheel the more I respect the power of advertising...or the appalling mess that comes from a lack of it.

I think you need to either build a step nozzle, or reshape your tapered flame nozzle to the recomended 1:12 shape. It isn't a question of the flame being too poor. I don't like how hot the nozzle is getting out in the open air. I have visions of it melting down into a puddle inside a forge. The upside is that it gets so hot, you should be able to run it for a few minutes, shut off the burner, and forge it to the right shape, over a smaller pipe, easily. Also, Larry Zoeller Forge sells stainless steel tapered nozzles cheap. I don't know why all you guys are bothering to build your own!