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How to get the choke sleeve to fit?!?!


Kintan

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Hey guys!  First time posting but been reading and browsing as a guest for awhile.  I am currently building my first propane forge and have a question. I am building a burner similar to the one in Mike Porter's book Gas Burners for Forges, Furnaces, and Kilns.  I have all the parts and am working on the vent and choke sleeves for the accelerator tube.  I have seen many designs that use a choke sleeve and everyone seems to find a pipe that nicely slides on their 3/4" or 1" black iron pipe.  I however have not been so lucky.  I cannot find anything that will fit without a huge gap around the smaller diameter pipe.  Do I need to just suck it up and file and grind the larger diameter pipe to fit or am I missing something here.

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Welcome to IFI... Have you read this yet? READ THIS FIRST

Not knowing where in the world you are located makes it difficult to give advice.

What type of pipe are you trying to fit? The choke can be light weight tubing like electrical conduit it doesn't have to be heavy like black iron pipe.

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Take a piece of 18 gauge metal (or 20 or 16 or whatever you have), cut it to size and hammer it around a pipe the same size as your burner, throw on a hose clamp, a tac weld or 3 and you have a choke tube.  If you don't have a torch to weld, you can use a propane torch and silver solder it (or braze it).  If it's not perfect that's ok, it'll still work.

DanR

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Always supposing that you used schedule 40 pipe, the next larger pipe will usually be just a few thousandths of an inch too small to slide smoothly over the smaller pipe. The will also probably be an internal weld bead to get rid of. The slot in the choke sleeve is supposed to get rid of most of that bead, leaving only two short areas at either end of the sleeve that need to be ground eve with the the rest of the internal surface. Then creating a slit in the remainder of the sleeve ends, allows it to spring open enough to slide easily back and forth on the burner's mixing tube; this is all in the book.

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Thanks guys.  Mikey I must have missed that part.  What happens when you read it on a phone I guess.  However, I wasn't going to have a slot in the sleeve.  I was going to just have a tapped hole with a thumb screw for adjustment.  Mr. Rotblatt, that sounds like a great idea.  I will probably give that a shot.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I started out by using galvanized pipe for the choke sleeve, since its inside diameters tend to be just a little larger than black iron pipe, and once the galvanizing is burned off,  grinding is reduced to power sanding. But stainless steel tube could be purchased  with large enough inside diameters, so that even sanding wasn't needed, and its small price was offset by the fact that it had good appearance. Since my burners called for buying S.S. tubing for their flame retention nozzles anyway...

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This is all true.  For me though, the galvanized pipe was left over from a job at my work.  I like saving when I can so this was one of those instances.  I appreciate your comments though.  Down the road if I decide to become a 2 burner man I will definitely keep those tips in mind.

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