Jump to content
I Forge Iron

G-son

Members
  • Posts

    119
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by G-son

  1. This thread is a gold mine of burner designing & building information. The upside to that is that the information you need is very likely in it, the downside is that just like a gold mine if you are looking for one specific thing you are going to spend hours looking through material you may not have a use for. It's great, but as a single forum thread can't really be divided into chapters and sections like a book it's impossible to make the information structured and easy to find, you WILL have to read it from start to finish, and probably more than once to absorb the information. An in depth discussion about power tools is probably great too, but it doesn't really fit well under the topic of how burners work and are designed, so I support the decision to move it to a better place. As I said, Burners 101 is a gold mine, but it doesn't make sense to add more rocks to it to make it harder to find the gold - even if that rock happens to be top quality marble it won't do you much good when marble isn't what you are looking for.
  2. G-son

    Forges 101

    With the proper machinery you can make the hole through the wall the right shape to BE the burner. Just add something to hold the gas jet and it's done!
  3. What about those cones used in kilns to tell temperature, I'm thinking they could be used to see what max temperature you can reach? Perhaps not very useful for everyday work, but for finding out the absolute max, or making a chart where different gas pressures are compared to the temperature achieved. I'm assuming they're cheap, as they are consumed when used. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrometric_cone
  4. G-son

    Forges 101

    Oh, I wish it would be so simple in Europe too. European union pulled the plug on borax being sold to common people because of the environmental impact it has.
  5. If Mikey himself was not able to get the 1/4" Mikey burner to work good enough I find it unlikely that I would have any better results with it. I actually was planning on building a mikey style ~1/4" burner first (adapted to the materials and tools I've got, so perhaps not a true mikey burner) just because I figured out how I could build one of those first and it seems to be relatively little work, but based on what you just said it seems it would most likely be a waste of time. Looks like it's indeed going to be a linear burner first.
  6. Then there's the flame temperature. Different burners seem to have different temperature flames, and logic suggests that the burner can not heat a forge above the flame temperature, no matter how big the energy output is.
  7. On that topic: Has anyone tried a automotive wide band lambda (oxygen) sensor in a forge, to measure the fuel/air mix ratio? Not sure if they survive the heat, but car exhausts coming from a glowing hot catalytic converter isn't exactly cool.
  8. The position of the end of the tip changes how much air is drawn into the burner. Shortening it moves the tip back away from the mixing tube, and increases the amount of air, i.e. making it run leaner.
  9. The hand held small burners I have are great for silver brazing small items, heating aluminum engine blocks for bearing replacement, and many other kinds of general heating. They're portable, I can just throw them in a backpack along with other tools when I go to repair something at a friends house. I also have a oxygen/acetylene welding set for the times I need more heat, but the size and weight makes it mostly stationary, and it's illegal to have in an apartment anyway (and lets not get into what it costs to refill the gas). I want a burner that fills some of the gap between those two options, something portable with better heat output, with at least five or ten minutes runtime before the bottle freezes. I did build a 18mm linear burner using the smallest MIG tip a year or two ago, the smallest easily accessible gas jet (at that time) seemed like a good start for testing. Works nice, but a hand held bottle freezes after about two minutes at full blast - kind of useless with that time limit, but I've learned a lot from it. I'm thinking if I go to a 8-10mm burner it should consume roughly a quarter of the gas the 18mm burns, and in theory it should take at least four times as long to freeze the bottle, i.e. 8 minutes or more at full power, and with the newly "discovered" smaller 3D printer nozzles burner builds in such sizes should be quite possible. Not perfect but such a burner should be good enough, I think I use the small torches 5 minutes or less most times - and that's the size I have now, more power output should make many of the current jobs faster.
  10. Ah, you don't just have to find the right chart, you need to read the right column too! Running 0.4-0.5 in a 6.7mm tube is even more impressive, it says something about how good that design is flowing air. (We already know that it's great, but still, worth pointing out again!) That last design of yours might work better as fuel than as a burner part. I'm leaning towards a linear burner as I've read they tend to work better than mikey burners in small sizes, but I have not decided yet. It's not so much a matter of what burner style I want to build, as what design I can make work with the tools and materials available. If I had a metal lathe it would be relatively simple to get all the pieces to line up, but with a drill, an angle grinder, a hack saw and some files I will no doubt have alignment issues no matter what route I go. Anyway, the goal is a burner in a size that a hand held gas bottle is able to feed, but larger than the store bought hand held burners I already have (~5mm mixing tube diameter). Something in the 8-10mm diameter seems resonable.
  11. You mean 1/8" schedule 40 pipe? Actual internal diameter 0.405" or 10.3mm. Looks very nice! I'm planning a ~10mm (probably linear) burner for hand held use, and was expecting around 0.4mm printer nozzle to work (based on data on Mikey burners, they seem to like jets about 4% of mixing tube actual diameter), so you have confirmed I'm probably in the right neighbourhood so far.
  12. Welcome here! But I want to point out there are other areas & threads on the forum about the construction of forges, with LOADS of informations about materials etc. While I'm sure lots of people are fine answering such questions here in the burners 101 thread too, I suggest going to the more suitable places first. This thread contains loads of priceless info about building and tuning burners, but it is 82 pages long, with 25 posts on each page - that totals over 2000 posts. It's already close to impossible to find the nugget of information you are looking for without spending several days reading it all from start to finish (which I have done a couple of times already, and need to do again), so keeping the unrelated stuff out of here would keep this thread slightly easier to use.
  13. Only the interior layers of insulation has to withstand the highest temperatures, if you add layers just to reduce size you should be fine using way cheaper lower temperature insulation for the outer layer.
  14. Those T:s on the burners seem to have the same size openings all around, if I remember correctly the recommendation is to have the two inlets one size larger than the mixing tube. Also, with the burners close together and two T openings turned towards each other they may affect air flow into the other burner. I'd turn them something like 90 degrees - don't know if it'll make a difference, but it's generally a good idea to keep it clear around most kinds of air inlets if you want good flow.
  15. T burner thread: Burners 101 thread: That should keep you busy reading until tomorrow.
  16. Have you read the "Burners 101" thread? I know it's crazy long and the information is spread out all over it, but there's great info about the basics of burners in there. I've read it several times, and I still learn something new when I dive in.
  17. Here in Sweden we have what I think is called value added tax in english. Prices on display for "regular people" ALWAYS has the VAT included, so they know exactly what they have to pay. Companies that sell to other businesses often show prices without VAT - the buying business still has to pay the VAT, but in general they get it back (and add VAT on the price they sell it on for). It might be because I am used to it, but I think prices should always be clear what you will actually pay.
  18. Based on the square head bolt & square nut I'd agree it's probably pre WW2, assuming the "hinge bolt" and nut is original.
  19. It is a pressure regulator, it regulates the pressure to a specific level - no matter if it feeds one or 10 burners, as long as it can keep up with the gas demand the pressure fed to the burner(s) will be the same. If it was a simple restricting valve it could work as you say with more burners meaning less pressure (at the same valve adjustment), but the regulator is built to give a constant pressure, regardless of how much gas is used. Again, until you exceed its capacity. If I recall, the benefit of multiple small burners instead of one large is that you can get more even heat in the forge, and the smaller burner flames are shorter and slow down quicker, meaning you get to keep more of the heat inside the forge. Ribbon burners with lots of small flames takes the same concept further.
  20. In theory… If you add extra layers of insulation just to reduce the internal size, those outer layers of insulation should never see the very high internal temperatures, so I'm guessing a cheaper, lower temperature insulation could be used there.
  21. I believe that relates to how the steel was made, not that the actual axe is a casting. In itself it doesn't seem to confirm or deny that the axe is a welded or monosteel item - everybody in history has bragged about the best properties of the items they sell, I have so far not seen anyone try to sell cutting tools saying "we make them with the best steel for the cutting edge and the cheapest stuff we can get away with for the rest". You mention the good stuff, you don't mention the rest... Either way, a simple spark test should give you a good idea if you've got high carbon steel or not. Take it to the grinder and the sparks will let you know.
  22. All right, thanks. It seems that adjustable jet position would be a nice addition to most/all(?) types of burners - but perhaps not always worth the extra work, if you're just going to tune it once and then leave it alone.
  23. Many axes (and other cutting tools) have mainly been made of cheaper low carbon steel, with just a small piece of high carbon steel forge welded in for the cutting edge. You may have an axe that has been used and sharpened so much the edge steel is gone, and what remains will not take a heat treat. A new piece of suitable steel can be forge welded to it in that case, used to be a common repair.
  24. This is a matter of getting the end of the gas jet in the right place in the burner to get the correct air flow, right? A different construction where the gas jet can be moved in/out could be used for the same result, or am I understanding the function wrong?
×
×
  • Create New...