Never tried kevlar hoses myself but I’ve heard from people whp used both that the Tinman hoses last longer. I have decades of experience with the Tinman hoses and I’m a fan, though they definitely are more fragile than the industrial red/green hoses. We used to splice them back together after cutting out the part with a hole in it, fairly often, so we kept a box of the crimp splices and the crimper handy. Not a daily thing but maybe once a month or two? That was in a busy shop with a half-dozen builders, some of whom weren’t very careful with stuff. They’d walk on them or let blobs of molten flux land on them, hot enough to melt rubber. If you own your own gear you tend to be more careful.
So I recommend using durable hoses from the regulators, then join to Tinman or whatever superlight hoses you can get, just for the last few feet, and try to keep them off the ground. If you only braze in one location in your shop, you can run the hoses along the ceiling and have it come down to you, rather than up.
I use a Harris 19-6 Torch and a flexible hose I ordered here in Germany. It took me a while to find a good hose but this one works really good and they can prepare custom lengths as well.
I will test it soon, I mostly got it because I wanted to retire the J27 but I have to say that the smoothness of the knobs and overall finish, the victor is still best even after more than 40 years.
Here I was trying to replace the silver braze as the same time, I think it went very well, I was focusing on trying to not burn the flux or overheat the piece in general.
I have no problem heating the metal, I believe this setup is exactly what I needed to get started, it’s easy and cheap.
I have noticed a few things:
I never need more than 3LPM of oxy pressure, usually I stay between 2 and 3 and I need to tweak it after a couple of minutes as it seems that either the propane regulator (cheapo amazon buy) or the oxy generator fluctuates in pressure, I can tell because the noise changes but a quick adjustment and all is good again.
Looks good! I just ran out of acetylene yesterday and I’m it’s going to cause me a little pain when I have to swipe my card at the gas store. I would definitely like to convert to propane in the future so I appreciate you all figuring this out and documenting it.
What do you mean by replace silver braze? Did you tin this joint with silver first?
Hello! While I don’t have a separate room to place the oxygen tank, I will look for information on using an oxygen concentrator.
I wonder which device to look at/performance and air pressure output.
Thanks for the answer.
I think most any 5 liter per minute (L/min) device is good enough, but you might want to avoid the small portable ones. I haven’t heard of any “bad” brands anyway. Doug Fattic has mentioned he likes his DeVilbiss.
My 5 L/min was working for anything short of my biggest rosebud, but I just picked up a 10 L/min 'cuz I couldn’t resist, $75 on craigslist. I’ll probably get rid of the 5 once the 10 has proven itself. 10 L/min units are usually way expensive, and the consensus is, 5 is enough, 10 is overkill. I might use it for something very heavy, like preheating a broken cast iron vise to braze the crack. Cast iron brazing requires a ton of preheating, you want the whole casting to be brought up slowly almost to brazing temperature, else it cracks either while brazing or while cooling down. When I did it, I used two rosebuds, cranked all the way up (that was with bottled O2). Some people have used propane weed-burners, which can put out a lot of BTUs with just ambient air, no O2 needed, never tried it myself though.
One place I worked we used two torches, one of them a rosebud, for brazing lugs. When you had it up to brazing temperature you’d hang up the rosebud on a gasaver, a switch that turns the torch off for you. Got lug joint brazing down to 90 seconds or less for a TT/HT lug, a bit more for the other joints. Saving time is always nice, but this also minimized time-at-temperature, which weakens the steel tubes in the HAZ and makes the HAZ bigger. Git 'er done!
I have enough torches, regs, hoses etc to set up to run two at once, but so far one had to be on bottled O2. So maybe I’ll keep two concentrators, and be totally free of dependency on the welding gas store. Oh happy day.
Hello! Perhaps someone has a ready-made video with the ST TT soldering process.
1.
I’m interested in the noise level from the operation of the burner on the oxygen concentrator.
2. Soldering time per connection
In Tom Lowry’s video, it seems to me, please correct me if I’m wrong or the tip is wrong or the pressure is low, but soldering takes a very long time. I would have done it faster on mapgaz. rack-mount-braze | Tom L | Flickr
Thank you.
In the Tom Lowry video he is holding the tip way too close to the braze-on. Common mis-perception is that the closer you hold it, the hotter it is. Not with Propane. It is the opposite of Acetylene - all the BTU’s are further out in the flame. The inner cone is nearly worthless for concentrated heat output.
Propane is IMHO really tricky for bridges and braze-ons. It can be done, but the tendency is to end up with a broad area being heated and then when you apply the filler metal it can get real sloppy, real fast. I’ve gotten somewhat better results using the tiny Jewelers tips.
For oxygen concentrators, any 5lpm works fine, I keep mine between 3 and 4 lpm, I found a devilbliss on craiglist for $50 and works wonders, very silent too, the torch noise covers the one of the concentrator, it’s like a constant humming, sort of white noise really, they are made to run for hours in close proximity with a person so they are not very noisy at all.
The seller for my concentrator didn’t really know how it worked, that helped me shave off $20 and I took it home for $50 but I took a risk as I also didn’t know how it worked.
Before you buy one read instructions or watch videos, the jewelry industry uses them a lot and 99% of the stuff in there applies to us as well.
For example:
My DeVilbliss showed a number of 5000+ on the display, the seller thought those were hours remaining instead they are hours run, a quick search and it tells me that it can go for another 10000 hours with no issues, also when she turned it on the status led would turn red and start beeping, this was just because the flow of oxigen was closed, once I opened it up and let the oxy flow it turned green after about 30 seconds. It only needed a cleanup and a dust-up.
The Devilbliss is particularly good as it already comes with the correct connector for a welding hose (no need for 1/4 adapters and plastic hose) and it has an internal tank to keep the pressure constant but I don’t think either of those are necessary - the Philips Everflow is also common.
Note that you will have to use different tips from oxy-acetilene, I use Paige tips, I started with a #3 but I found that #2 works better for my style and most important, propane heats different from acetilene, inner cone is cooler.
TY for this; this is the type of feedback I was hoping to get when I posted the video earlier in the thread. That is good to know re: propane flame. I don’t have a point of comparison with acetylene. I have a pretty small tip on there was trying to keep the head concentrated into one area. Probably could have done it a lot quicker, but at least I didn’t exhaust the flux. Good learnings for next time.
Great thread. The flame part especially. General question though; is there a performance reason or health reason to switch to propane, or is it mostly cost/availability move?
For me, I didn’t had acetylene before so it was not a switch, without talking about oxygen tank vs concentrator, switching only acetylene to propane is mostly safety and cost.
Acetylene is more regulated than propane here in the US, to refill a tank I need to go to an airgas or similar businesses (like I already do for Argon) that IF they even want to sell to you, they are only open 9-5 monday to friday and for an amateur that mostly works on the weekend it doesn’t work well, on top of that, certain cities have ordinances where a private cannot hold acetylene tanks, if such ordinance exists where you live then you have zero choice in the matter.
Propane is just easier to handle, I can get my tank refilled or swapped at the local gas station or grocery store or hardware store, I have 5-6 options within a 1 mile radius, cheaper, always open, not as heavily regulated.
The conventional wisdom I found when I chose to buy a giant oxy-acetylene setup was that acetylene is better because it burns a bit hotter, so you spend less time heating up the joints and heat soaking your tubes. I have never used propane, so I can’t speak to the veracity of that.
My guess is that the only time you would find yourself wishing for acetylene if you wish to oxy-fuel weld or cut steel. 5100 degrees F for propane vs 5700 for acetylene are probably insignificant when brazing temperatures don’t exceed 1800 degrees F.
Acetylene also has a sharper/more visible hot zone, so it’s easier and more obvious for regulating your heat and flame, but nothing that can’t be worked around.
I’ve been happy learning with propane, but am planning on moving back to acetylene as I’m moving out of my own shop and will be doing work out of a larger shop that already has acetylene set up.
Thanks for all the advice given here already - I took a framebuilding course using acetylene and a gas fluxer last summer and now finally got my own oxycon-propane set up going.
I do find it a bit trickier to light the torch, as opening my oxygen has the tendency to blow out/detach the flame instead - but that might be pressure related? I have my propane set at around 4psi, and my Devilbiss concentrator at 2-3lpm.
I have the Welders Warehouse multi jet propane tips (sizes 3, 5 and 7), but still figuring out what size is best, what distance to keep and if my flame is neutral or not. With acetylene I find it quite a breeze to match the cones, with propane I’ve read to take a look at the color of the flame, but find that really hard without proper reference. It can go from very bright, almost white is to more blue with a white border.
Time in the shoes. You will find that balance. I find creeping up on flame size when lighting the torch is the way to go. Little flame in LPG then introduce teh oxygen. Then shuffle up to where you want it.
I am going to get myself a little bottle of acet and borrow a torch and have a go at it with the bronze but most of my builds use silver so not a big priority for me.
