Mikey98118

tony, It seems clear that the outside chamber and air feed system (fan, etc.) for a ribbon burner will require a fair amount of space and a rigid support structure, so you might as well build a small table for it to sit on. what kind of forge do you place on the table? brick pile or square seem the practical choices.

Buzzkill, I just wrote you a lengthy reply, which promptly disappeared into cyberspace when I pressed "Submit Reply." So this one will be short. Methane is rated about one-half as effective at heating as other fuel gases. Water formation in the secondary flame is the reason given for this inconvenient fact. I've used methane heating torches, which put out really impressive looking flames, and can tell you from first hand experience that the poor heating performance quoted is so. This information is all available on the web. Mikey

Frosty, I think we're talking apples and oranges. For one thing you seem to be thinking along the lines of vortical flow in an expanding tapered mixing tube, which will produce some effects that I'm speaking of, but will reverse others. I'm recommending producing spin (not push) at the large opening of a funnel; that funnel's small opening connects to the rear end of a burner's mixing tube. One facet of vortical flow (speeding forward motion of the mix my way, and slowing it your way) are opposite effects of the same principle used in reverse; same principle but different applications. Better mixing and and lowered flame nozzle pressure will happen both ways. I don't find one method superior to the other; I see both of them proving useful, so long as they are applied deliberately. Mikey

Charlotte, Methane's theoretical flame temperature is nearly the same as propane; not its proven heating value, which is about one-half. Both the CO and H2 combustion are heat producing, so minor heat is added in the secondary flame. Formation of the H2O leaches heat from the secondary flame; it does not produce heat.

What I like best about this group is the fresh ideas it inspires. This summer I will have to build another brick pile forge (in the heavy table this time), and install a fan-blown ribbon burner in it. Speaking of fresh ideas, its time to point out some advantages of oval forges over tube forges; they are built to provide additional width inside, but can be run with interior baffles to save gas when heating narrow stock. Yet oval forges are better than square forges because, like tube forges they will naturally shed heat from their bottom side as well as the top side, so that there is reduced heat transfer to a table top. So, why should someone claiming to have designed a powerful new kind of burner be interested in ribbon burners? Because I don't believe in an "ultimate" burner design, and don't even want there to be such a thing (Viva variety). At least one manufacturer claims interior equipment temps of 2700 degrees, and several sources claim excellent "hang time" for combustion gas, along with low noise levels. Anyone primarily interested in equipment design, and claiming to have an open mind, should be willing to investigate such claims, whether doing so is personally convenient or not.

Mine was built more as a movable hot-work surface where small welding and brazing projects could be done in a garage or off-site, but one of the abilities it has is to be used as a base for brick forges. It has UK style double gas outlets controlled by ball valves, twenty-five feet of 1/4" fuel line stripped from a torch hose, steel wheels, and a bottom shelf to store the five-gallon propane cylinder and a water tank; it also has a 3000 degree kiln shelf top supported by insulated fire brick over a layer of calcium silicate board, which "floats" on a thick layer of Perlite. The table top is 6" thick in all, and super insulated. There is a built in torch portal of 3000 degree castable refractory that can hold up to a 1" pipe burner. The whole thing could easily be lifted onto my truck bed as it doesn't weigh over thirty pounds stripped down, and all the "stuff" it carries can then be installed with it in place. The cart also features a built in variable height swinging insulated lid, so the forge can easily be used with brick for heating large scrolls and circular designs. That is the beauty of a configurable (brick pile) forge; endless accessories can be added to it for convenient heating of darn near anything, and it can be wheeled over to a corner of the shop afterward. The cart has been used for night classes at some working historical site in Maryland since 2006 along with all the other gas burner equipment that we demonstrated at the ABANA Conference in Kentucky that year. I now have a heavy duty hard fire brick work table, but then welding and brazing are more important aspects of equipment R & D than forging is; I do a lot more of that than wrought iron these days, being an old guy and all :-) Frosty, The way we missed connections was that you and Ron started out a few years ahead of me. I originally was gearing up to do wrought iron, after the shipyards in Seattle dried up and blew away, but health problems cancelled all that and left me with a lot of time for research. Originally, I started designing burners that would run completely clean in a gas forge, hoping to salvage some part of my plans, but never could recoup enough health for it, and drifted into writing instead. I imagine you felt just as stubborn after your accident, and Ron did after his long bout with pneumonia, but all three of us learned that we got old sometime while we weren't looking...bet ya every generation learns the same lesson, while "going down kicking and screaming" about it, yes? Mikey

The mortar will work fine IF you use rigidizer on the ceramic blanket first. Most rigidizer is colloidal silica (better known as fumed silica), a light inexpensive product to have shipped through the mail; colloidal means it will stay suspended in water, which carries it well into the fiber blanket. Add a little food coloring and you can see how far it is penetrating. Let it dry and then fire it hard, before adding the no more than 1/4" thick layer of mortar. Yes, definitely paint the mortar with ITC-100; the fuel you save will pay for it in a few months. Have fun and stay safe.

Tony, The guys are giving you a lot of good advice. Mine is to hold your horses and do a little more research before you jump in and start building. No amount of questions and answers will set you up with all you need to know unless you plan to spend a couple of years asking them. You can buy books on the subject too, and they will help you ask the right questions in the first place. Try looking up gas burners or gas forges on Amazon.com in their book section. If you don't have a very good idea what you want to do with a forge, I would like to suggest to either deliberately start small, like with a knife making forge, or build a "forge cart" on which you can set up various insulated brick forge shapes, while making up your mind what you really want to work with. The advantage to these polar opposite pieces of heating equipment is that they both will get used even after you decide to build a particular forge for your own passions. The forge cart is also a usefull surface for doing welding, brazing, etc. For general gas forge shapes, you should at least investigate oval forges, before making a decision. Don't forget to include a kiln shelf floor in your forge, because all the insulating materials and thin refractory coatings being recommended to you won't take a beating or stand up to flux attack, and hard brick becomes a heat sink. While two inches of ceramic fiber is a good standard thickness, you want to install it as separate 1" blanket layers to avoid rippling in the finish surface. Ceramic fiber products de-laminate so easily that they need to be rigidized anyway. Then, of course we come to burners...:-) As to buy versus build, if you're running a business already, buy a good forge. Otherwise, build; it isn't just about saving money. When you build a tool you learn a lot about it.

Charles says "My interest at this point is in NG burners, particularly as my gas company is very open to installing high pressure taps. Less so with blown NG burners." I'm afraid you're do for considerable disappointment if you want to use natural gas in a naturally aspirated burner. The commonly accepted idea is that NG is only used in fan-blown forges because most people are stuck with an ultra low-pressure gas service. This 'fact' is only partially true, and very misleading. One art school I attended had high pressure NG available, but only used it in two large NA annealing torches for their jewelry classes; their bronze casting furnaces, day tanks, and glory holes were all fan-blown. The reason for this is simple; methane burns with about one-half the heating ability of any other LPG fuel. Methane uses less oxygen, and therefore less air than any other hydrocarbon fuel except acetylene, and its primary flame temperature is rated only a little below propane, so you'd think it would be a hot burning fuel. But there are two facts about methane combustion most people don't know. In the first place about 80% of methane is consumed in the secondary flame---not the primary. But even worse is the recombining of some of the combustion products to produce large amounts of water vapor, which sucks a bunch of the combustion heat right back out of those flames, in a nasty Catch 22. And so we come back to a fan-blown system's ability to burn a whole lot of fuel in a short amount of time; this is the real reason fan-blown burners are needed for natural gas. Why isn't this common knowledge? Because low pressure gas service keeps the overwhelming majority of forge and furnace builders from even trying to build a naturally aspirated NG burner, so they never find it out...fortunately. Massive amounts of combustion produce massive amounts of hot exhaust gases. It's all very fine to set up a powered exhaust hood to keep the air in your shop breathable, but enough wasted heat is going to spill over into your shop to give the expression "dragon's breath" a whole new meaning. Am I knocking fan-blown burner systems? No; I'm saying "make your equipment building decisions in line with fact; not fiction." If you live someplace very cold through most of the year, heating the shop up is a good thing. If you live someplace that gets hot for most of the year, not so good.

Also, a 1/4" burner is the perfect size for powering a coffee-can casting furnace or knife forge. But so would a rebuilt Meeker burner, and a one pound propane canister would probably run it for up to half an hour for off-site demos. There is a lot of metal work done by jewelers and others who heat materials for many purposes.

if you would like to discuss the forge more, I think it would be fascinating for many of us. After all, brick forges are configurable, and I don't know of any other forge that can do that trick.

Frosty, That's a lot of questions at once, but the answer to most of them is simple :-) I left the gas burner book with 1/2" burners as the smallest size because MIG contact tips only go down to 0.031" orifices as the minimum. The ideal orifice for a gas accelerator on a 1/2" pipe burner would be 0.028". While 0.031" orifices are barely serviceable, less than the best possible performance is aggravating to me (as you pointed out). So, I recommended employing torch tips for miniature burners, and listened to a lot of criticism about their prices. The only practical answer for constructing smaller burners was to employ capillary tubing. Back in 2004 heavy wall gauge tube and other sources of capillary tube were cheap and easy to obtain, but in following years their sources dried up quite a lot. So, the search for easy sources continued. The point of Luer-lock dispensing needles is that they are an industrial standard supply for dispensing solder, glue, etc.; thus, their continued supply is as assured in the marketplace as anything. You can find brass and stainless steel Luer-lock adapters with many common thread sizes on their attached connector fittings , along with barbed ends for direct connection to gas hose, you can find both 1/8" and 1/4" pipe thread. One of the available thread sizes is 10-32, so they can easily be threaded into existing bases, like those found on lab burners, with a little drilling and re-threading: http://www.mcmaster.com/#luer-fittings/=zy9a6c Scroll down to the bottom of the page. Which brings us to, why 3/8" and 1/4" burners anyway? 3/8" burners will run two-gallon forges and casting furnaces. How well? A 3/8" Mikey burner will turn two-thirds of the enterior on a two-gallon forge yellow-white hot without producing exit flames from its exhaust openings, or two of them running at half power will heat the complete enterior white hot if you want to work on a sword. At a casting party my buddy Dan Brewer borrowed my two-gallon casting furnace, stuffed a #8 crucible in it, and brought a load of brass to pouring temperature from a cold start in fifteen minutes flat; the burner that powered it was 3/8". A 1/4" burner will heat a bowl shaped chip forge for silver brazing large parts on air-propane. And of course both sizes are great to use for hand torches. But, in all this we see my bias towards more and ever more concentrated power. Perhaps a rebuilt Meeker burner with a Luer-lock gas accelerator used to power a coffee-can sized knife forge could be equally impressive in a much quieter way...

So, speaking of employing other kinds of burners, I collected a bunch of lab burners to try rebuilding into something a little heartier than low pressure gas heaters for chemistry tubes. It turns out that the first wasp-waist burners were used this way; they can be had on the cheap used through eBay. If you want to rebuild one to use higher pressure propane

Your point about not blowing the heat right out of the forge is well made, and I believe that is what ribbon burners are all about. Still, it will be interesting to see your results.

Frosty, Alas, it's too late for a rousing debate between us, because of my own ambivalent feelings. I've run full circle, and just as I come up with a wonderful new burner, find this inconvenient reasonableness greatly increasing my respect for the other guy's viewpoint. It takes a lot of the joy out of my present book plans. But, on the other hand, should do a lot to improve the book that these Vortex burners have interrupted, once I can get back to it. You will remember that my very first burner change was installation of MIG tips on old Aussie style burners; it is still included in Ron's burner pages. But, straight tube flame nozzles with spacer rings wasn't. When the MIG tips are combined with larger reducer fittings they jump mixture feed up enough to allow the straight nozzles to work on these old burners, producing a performance leap in a simple to construct burner. But, due to circumstances beyond my control, I never got to point that out at the time. And, in any case, older burner designs have their own advantages. Blunt tip stainless steel Luer-lock dispensing needles come in both plastic hubs (unsafe) and metal hubs (recommended); they can be found in many orifice sizes from McMaster-Carr, eBay, and many other sources. These needles come in perfect orifice sizes for maximum flame performance on any burner. You cannot order by gauge size, because inside diameters of the same gauge can vary several thousandths of an inch depending on wall thickness, so you must look for I.D. listings. Dispensing tips are also available through eBay, and Amazon.com. Luer-lock dispensing needles mount on nickel plated brass or stainless steel male adapters (plugs) that are combined with various connector fittings in both threaded and barbed ends. By varying length and orifice sizes on the needles I have been able to eliminate the need for 3" and 4" long gas tubes on burners up to 3/8" pipe equivalent size (included in a publisher's update of the original book), and expect to continue this happy practice with all the burner sizes, as time permits more experiments.

Hi, Frosty. I'd been overheated with writing books on so many subjects, and just spent less and less time writing on groups. But recently a hacker destroyed three of my books (no back up copies; my bad), and I decided to set a saner pace. Four years back I started to research and write a general work on fan-blown systems. Two years ago I tried using an impeller style axial computer fan at the funnel entrance to power a linear NA burner (wanted to review linear burners anyway, as my early success with jet-ejectors pulled me away from them sooner than I liked). The result was so powerful that I've concentrated on Vortex burners every since. After the initial Eureka moment, I went back and started reading up on vortices, since I could find no other phenomena to explain the mind blowiing performance increase. Wow, just read a little bit on the laws of vortical flow, and you'll soon wonder how we could have missed the opportunities it presents all these years; its like the magic answer to every builder's problems and limitations in burner construction. For instance pushing air through a funnel will create spin, which is so necessary for proper air/gas mixing, but it also increases mixture pressure in the mixing tube a little further on. This is added to the increased pressure that the fuel gas stream causes while inducing air into the tube. The total pressure increase has a very bad effect in the flame nozzle, severely limiting nozzle vacuum, and therefore limiting flame performance. But take a fraction of that fan power and use it to directly increase vortical flow, instead of as a by-product of pushing air, and incoming air feed rate increases, along with spin rate, WHILE PRESSURE IN THE MIXING TUBE DROPS. Thus, at the same time mixture feed is being greatly increased, flame nozzle pressure is greatly decreased, allowing a given nozzle diameter to hold a much larger and faster flame in place. Since mixing is so much more thorough the flames are less turbulent, and therefore the jet engine roar of flame noise also drops. A win, win, win situation. Would you like a general discussion on this subject?

Latticino's advice was very good; he came closest to pointing you in the exact right direction, not that the others didn't do well too. The bottom line is that you want to head for the richest sources for NG burner information. If I were in your shoes, Ward Burner Systems web site is where I'd start; their free articles will give you the best information on setting up an NG system that will pass muster with your local Fire Marshal. Second best source for information is Giberson's book on home built glass blowing equipment. These were my two favorite information sources back in 1999, when I was doing research to decide what way I wanted to jump with my own heating equipment decisions. I basically chose NA burners only after working in a metal arts shop just to get aqainted with their equipment, and ended up deciding that I definitely wanted to control the dragon's breath problem better than a fan-blown NG burner system would allow. Take a little more time doing the background research and then get back to us with your impressions, yes? The only kind of naturally aspirated burner that possibly could work with the very low pressure natural gas normally piped to homes might be a Vortex burner, but since I haven't had time to research that possibility yet, I can't recommend trying to build one for the purpose. Also, since more flame at less velocity will produce the least amount of dragon's breath in a fan-blown system, I would be inclined to build a ceramic based ribbon burner to heat the forge and use something like a Fisher burner to supply it with a gas/air mixture; just a thought. That same Michael Porter

Frosty, Fisher burners are the modern equivalent of old cast iron "wasp waist" burners; to me they are way out of date tech. But, you and I seem to be coming from opposite ends of the spectrum for what we want out of a burner flame. You appear to want a soft quiet slightly reducing flame well suited to forge welding. I want a fast hard flame with total primary combustion and zero CO output. I care much more about clean burning forges than scale formation. This is because, after 45 years of welding I am the canary in the mine shaft :-) It's kind of a case of apples and oranges. I'm actually glad for the difference. If we perfectly agreed, what could we possibly teach one another? I'm learning a lot from you; don't know if you're learning much from me, but I'm happy with the deal. Should we discuss gas jets again? I have a new trick...

Ceramic fiber wears out because of linear shrinkage from heat cycles, and from a serious tendency for the layers to delaminate from each other. But the worst wear factor is the tendency of the fibers to form crystabolite particles at 1600 F. All these problems are seriously reduced by using rigidizer, which works by coating the fibers all over; this locks the fibers in position where the cross each other. the major content in Rigidizer is water, which steams away during heat curing, leaving a pretty thin layer of silica. So, loss of insulating qualities is minor while strengthening is major. A rigidized layer also makes good support for a thin refractory layer (1/4" is good). In turn, the nice smooth hard refractory layer becomes a perfect support for an infrared "reflective" layer, such as ITC 100, and also allows that layer to be thinner ($$$$ saved).

Many people run induction burners in forges and casting furnaces without a flame nozzle; I've done so myself just to prove it works. So why go to all the work of building, or the expense of buying, a flame nozzle? Well, why buy a Ferrari when an old farm truck is cheaper? The answer in both cases is performance. Although a flame nozzle isn't necessary to get an induction burner to work in some heating equipment, the burner will work much better with than without one. BTW, this is also true of flan-blown burners, as anyone operating a glass-blowing furnace (day tank, glory hole, etc) could tell you. Look up more information on the kind of flame nozzles commonly used for fan-blown burners at Ward burner systems, and many other sites used by people running large burner systems for hot glass work and for large pottery kilns. But, when your hair curls at the prices quoted, just remember that you can still build and install your own stainless steel flame nozzle for a LOT less money :-)

Thomas, Generally speaking, you are correct. But, but the longer "hang time" from smaller hotter flames must also be taken into account, making you even more correct than you thought :-) But, the high production rates from fan-blown forges cannot be denied... I had to put aside my own preferences-turned-prejudices, and start investigating powered burner systems to come up with a truly updated burner design; it's called a Vortex burner, and uses both induction and fan power. Vortex burners are power boosted NA burners that can operate in either mode, because they definitely are not fan BLOWN burners. Their very weak impeller fans, can run on highly portable 12V batteries for hours at a time because their power is used to boost the action of a vortex in a constricted area (funnel shape), rather than to blow more air into a burner. What they do blow is every previous NA burner design (including all of mine) "off the road." But are they the ultimate perfect burner? NO; there just ain't no such animal!!! Even the most wonderful of burners is just another burner, and the very virtues that make it outstanding for some jobs will reduce its utility for others. After I finish playing with this design, it's back to the old grind investigating fan-blown burners, which still due some tasks too well to be ignored (darn it). Mikey

After inventing, perfecting, and writing about gas heating equipment for the last sixteen years. I can tell you all from personal experience that the ongoing debate on powered versus naturally aspirated burners is just wrong headed. The best any of us can do is observe and learn about the equipment he/she actually uses. I've yet to see anyone from one camp deliberately investigate the equipment beloved by the other. Here, I'm suggesting an open minded evaluation that might take years; not a few months of dissatisfaction with a particular piece of equipment that was probably a poorly designed and/or constructed product in the first place; for who abandons a forge or burner because of over satisfaction with it? unless burner design, rather than forging, is your main passion how will you find time for such an effort? Without walking this path, your only reasonable hope if gaining sufficient knowledge into equipment you don't have (let alone use) is to ask about it from those who do; so how much even handedness is it reasonable to expect from those you insult? BTW, burners and heating equipment just happens to be my passion, yet I've only begun to investigate powered burners. Frosty happens to be right about "no free lunch" with fan-blown burners; they tend to put out more heat overall during a given time span, but that either comes at the cost of more fuel expended or of lower maximum temperature in the equipment; in either case "hang time" for any given combustion product is reduced. So if you're looking for shorter heating cycles go fan-blown; If you're looking for fuel efficiency, forget it. One other thing that only fan-blown burners do well is power chip forges, for any naturally aspirated burner capable of providing sufficient heat to the chip holding area, will overheat the firing chamber below it; the reason for this limitation is compact high temperature flames. Fan-blown burners can produce much larger lower temperature flames. Production is critically important to people making a living, just as keeping costs low and shop areas cool is to most hobbyists. However, a successful hobbyist is likely as not to find him/her self drifting over to the professional side, so keeping an open mind is kind of important. Mikey

Hi Frosty, I like what you said about "venturi" burners. I gave up trying to point out the flaw early on, but it is quite confusing for people who start out by trying to look up venturi systems, instead of Bernoulli's Principle. Bottom line is that the constricting shape past which the air is being induced by the fuel gas has everything to do with spinning the gas and air for proper mixing, and nothing whatever to due with venturi systems. All successful NA burners spin the fuel gas and air, whether by using a funnel shape at the air opening of a linear burner, a single side opening (side-arm and modified side-arm burners) or multiple side openings (Mikey burners) Mikey

This is the first time I've seen one of these burners, but I can tell you a few good things about it. In the first place, seeing the red/orange hot flame nozzle out in open air tells me that the fuel/air mixture is exposed to a generous ignition source (very good). Your combustion is mostly in the primary flame envelope; AKA combustion wave front (also very good). The orange streaks in the secondary flame are from a reaction between super-heated gases and that particular stainless steel alloy, which is undoubtedly #304, instead of the longer lasting #316 S.S. alloy; you needn't worry about them, but you will have to replace your flame nozzles much sooner than you would with #316. Now we come to the color of your primary flame, which has a slight tinge of green in it, instead of being pure light blue. There was a time when I would have said VERY NOT GOOD, but so long as you use your forge outdoors, or are careful to provide your forge area with a powered exhaust system for it is merely problematic; in other words both good and not so good. The good part is that it will provide a perfect heat source for welding, as the slightly reducing flame will protect your work from oxidation, while in the forge. The not so good part is that, if you ignore Frosty's recommendations about providing a powered exhaust system and CO alarm in your shop, you could end up with carbon monoxide poisoning, which is an outright bad thing. Mikey

You mentioned getting a new 20 pound tank. Many states used the compulsive replacement of old five gallon propane cylinders with upgraded models featuring overflow devices as an opportunity to also quietly include internal pressure limiting devices that are capable of running a barbecue, but hopelessly under-powered for running a typical burner. If you ended up with one of these tanks, it will never provide sufficient gas to power even the smallest NA burner. Should this be your problem, buying a much larger tank locally or buying a new five gallon tank in another state are your only solutions. Mikey