CUTTING TORCH BASICS (SECRET TO A CLEAN CUT EVERY SINGLE TIME)

what's the purpose of this why do i twist the last little bit of my torch hoses together if you're new here welcome my name is austin ross i've been a welder for about 15 years welding on the pipeline for about eight of those years here on this channel i share tips and tricks for mobile rig welders those are videos that you're interested in make sure and subscribe and ring that bell to get notified when i post a new video every friday also if you're new another thing we like to prioritize around here is coffee so if you don't have a cup of coffee poured pause the video go brew yourself a pot of coffee or pour yourself a cup of coffee if you've already got your pot brewed kick back and just enjoy the video alright we'll start off with the torch itself if you've been following me and you've wondered what brand of torch that i use and what torch the circle burner that we carry in the aeros welding store will fit on you can actually text the word torch to 405-643-7176 and i will send you a list of part numbers for both the small and large torch set like just to get this torch in general but that list will also include the part numbers for the straight attachments for each torch that will work with the circle burner that we carry in the aeros welding store this is considered the small torch it is a victor brand as compared to the large torch i do not own a large torch anymore so i'll put i will put a picture up on the screen so you can see the difference in the torches here obviously the main difference is the large torch is larger and another way that you can tell the difference just at a glance is by this cutting lever this cutting lever is shaped a little bit different on the small one versus the large one victor has came out with several different models of small torches and large torches some names you'll see are performer and journeyman performer is known as the small torch which is what we have here and the journeyman is considered the big torch so this here is our torch tip the torch tip has got numbers on it the first number is the size of your tip so right here we got 0-3-101 zero is your size zero is also known as one not ott is another word for zero that zero as far as a victor brand of torch tip is talking about the center hole here the center hole is where your oxygen comes out of and then the little holes around the center hole a center hole is where your acetylene comes out of also known as fuel or gas a one ought which is the size of torch tip that's in this torch right now is my go-to size for roughly quarter inch plate anywhere a little bit less than quarter inch and on up to three eighths maybe half an inch i'm gonna most generally use a one ounce size of torch tip to change out your torch tip you just loosen off this nut right here that nut comes all the way off you take your torch tip out put your other size in and rock and roll all right so like i mentioned this here is our cutting lever whenever you press on this lever here air will come out of that center hole that i just got through talking about on the torch tip that's what actually cuts the metal this knob here is considered fuel or acetylene this knob here is your oxygen and this knob here is also known as oxygen but one thing you'll notice as we're going over oxygen and acetylene is all of your acetylene fittings has left-handed threads which just means what you would normally do to tighten a nut it's the total opposite and you can see the difference just by looking at this nut here on this quick connect this nut has got a notch in it and that means it's left-handed threads it's the same way on our acetylene regulator and anything with acetylene or fuel it's going to have a notch in it versus your oxygen which does not have any notch in it all right so to light your torch the first thing you're going to do is make sure this knob is turned all the way on it can stay on all the time it never gets turned off on my torch unless i'm going to be brazing brazing or using a rosebud but anyway for general cutting this oxygen knob down here can be left on all the time so this is always on this is turned off and this is turned off right now so it's tight to light the torch i'm going to crack the acetylene i'm going to take my striker and strike it right here in front of the tip and as long as your hoses are full of fuel you will see a flame and then you're going to turn this acetylene up just turn it up a little bit more until that black soot kind of fades away where it's the soot's not as strong and then you reach up here to your oxygen knob and turn it on until your little blue cones are even i'll show you those here in a minute if your little blue cones are not even chances are your tip needs to be cleaned that is actually one of the biggest tips that i have for using a oxygen acetylene torch is a clean tip if your tip is not clean you will feel like you're cutting with a piece of junk that is like the secret to making a quality cut with an oxygen and settling torch is a very clean tip here in a minute i'll go over how i like to clean a torch tip so your torch is lit you make your cut by preheating your metal and using your cutting lever to to cut once you've got your cut made you're ready to turn off your torch the way i was taught is to turn off your acetylene first so turn it off that'll cut out everything but your oxygen will still be coming out but there won't be no flame you just reach up here and turn this oxygen knob off so like i mentioned these down here are quick connects your torch that you buy will not come with quick connects these are sold separately the brand i use is kawiki i believe i'll spell that here on the screen so you can see these quick connects just allow you to detach your torch in a reasonable amount of time like real quick hence the name quick connect versus having to have a wrench to put your hoses on your torch and then have to leave your torch connected to your hose or have to get a wrench to disconnect your hoses depending on how often you weld you may or may not care to have these quick connects you can definitely leave your torch hooked up all the time like if you're in a shop or and you maybe don't use a torch very often you can leave it hooked up it's not a big deal and like i said if you're in a shop you're not worried about storing this out of the weather but if you don't have a garage or carport or something to store your welding rig whether that be a trailer or an old pickup or something if you don't have a way to store it out of the weather you may want to get a set of quick connects that way you can detach your torch and put it in a toolbox like i do after you use it all right real quick i want to go over how i clean a torch tip the first thing i like to do to properly clean a torch tip is to remove the tip from the torch to do that you just take this brass nut off and the torch tip just comes right out there's no threads or anything it just seats in there take your torch tip out and the first thing that i like to do is take a fine file and file the end of my torch tip just to kind of reface it doing my best to keep it square they do make a tool i guess it would be called a re-facing tool it's made to slide right over the torch tip and then you spin this and it's got a little i guess supposed to have a little knife in here that kind of refaces the torch tip i personally have not had very much luck with this there might be a better brand i don't know but i actually just this is the only brand i've ever tried i just recently got it like six months ago or something because i was like i need to try that but i don't have very much luck luck with it so i always just use a fine file get a good face on it get all the slag and stuff off the end and then take a just a general set of torch tip cleaners which as you can see here there's just several different sizes of essentially like round files and i start with my center hole i find the one that fits and i run these little bitty round files in and out of the middle hole and then i do the same thing it'll take a different size but for the little holes on the outside and that usually makes my tip nice and clean okay next we'll go over regulators these here are regulators they've got plastic covers these are obviously used we've got two different brands here got smith and victor these plastic covers will actually you can just twist them off in case you need to work on your regulator or you know they become sun faded like mine have and you can't hardly see through them you can remove these plastic covers one of these gauges are your pressure and the other one is how much contents are in the bottle like i said earlier we're gonna see some left-handed threads on the acetylene you can tell that by the little notches in the nut versus the smooth nut here as your regular right-handed threads which means it's your oxygen a torch set that you buy will generally come with a set of regulators a little bit of torch hose and the torch itself a striker and i believe it even comes with some brazing tips and maybe even a rosebud i believe you can buy just a torch but it's just going to cost a lot more versus buying the kit that they sell in fact in the past whenever i've needed new regulators i would actually buy a whole new set because just to get one regulator it was like half the price of the whole kit i don't know if it's still that away but that's how it was back whenever i was you know buying stuff from my shop buying stuff for a different welding truck because back in the day i had more than one welding truck so anyway the best bang for your buck is to buy the kit as far as bottles go they make several different sizes of bottles but the sizes that i use are what they call a k size oxygen just the letter k that's the size of oxygen that i use which is over here my acetylene is on the other side i use what they call a medium size acetylene depending on where you live you may be able to buy a set of bottles and just pay to refill them whenever you empty them or you may have to rent a set of bottles which in my case that's what i do i've i think i actually own a set whenever i was working in colorado i actually bought a set of bottles because i offered to buy them or i think maybe that was the only way i could get bottles up there was to buy them so i think i own a set and then i rent a set the ones that are on my truck now i'm pretty sure i rent them from the local welding supply so as far as where to get bottles that's what i recommend is your local welding supply if you don't know of your local welding supply start by researching air gas and the only reason i say that is because air gas is nationwide so you're going to have a better chance of finding an air gas maybe maybe not depending on where you're from versus finding some random or a smaller local welding supply also if you're planning to travel air gas is a good option because if you rent a set of bottles from air gas in oklahoma but then you travel to pennsylvania and you need to swap bottles you can just find an air gas up there and they ought to be able to swap your bottles or refill them because you've got your bottles from an air gas somewhere in the states most generally whenever you go to get a refill they generally just swap a bottle that's how it is with me if my oxygen bottle is out of oxygen i will go to my welding supply and i will just give them this bottle they will give me a new one that's already full so you don't actually keep the same set of bottles that you rent or buy all right now let's go over the recommended pressures for your regulators on our oxygen the recommended just to start out on your pressure over here is between 25 and 30 and on your acetylene it's around 10 8 or 10 i believe is the recommended starting pressure we'll just say 10 and 25 25 for your oxygen and 10 for your acetylene that's a good starting point that's going to be good for cutting general stuff general thickness quarter inch half inch plate if you get into cutting thicker stuff or a bigger size of tip to cut thicker metal you may want to adjust your pressures on up but again for the basics of torch cutting you can do 80 percent of probably whatever you're to do with the pressures of 25 and 10. all right so before we go over how to set your pressure on your regulator i wanted to bring you up here and kind of talk about the general rule as far as hooking up your regulator so one thing to keep in mind is this is brass and so is the threads that are on the oxygen bottle itself so whenever you're tightening this just make sure don't over tighten it because it will stretch your threads on your bottle or your regulator here and it won't seal right to check for leaks once you get it snug if it's quiet enough you can turn your bottle on and then wait a little bit wait till your hoses fill up with oxygen and you can kind of listen sometimes you can listen and hear air leaking and you know that it's it's not tight enough you need to tighten it some more the more accurate way to test for a leak is soapy water just squirt soapy water right here around your connection and even right here where you hook your hose up to your regulator you might spray a little soapy water to make sure your connections are all tight if it bubbles up that means there's a leak so making sure everything is nice and snug you can see here i've got a quick connect on my regulator this is not a necessity at all actually because 90 of the time your regulator is going to stay on your hose the only reason i have a quick connect is because whenever i was pipelining most pipeline companies supplied bottles so it was common for us to travel to a job without bottles and whenever we got there we would put our regulator on their bottles so just to kind of make that a faster process i put quick connects on here i do recommend using a safety cap while you're traveling they do make a cap that covers your knob but also allows you to keep your regulator on i do have them i just fail to put them on like i should so i do recommend that that's going to keep you from getting a high dollar ticket they make one for both the oxygen and acetylene and so once everything's secure you got your regulator on if it's a brand new regulator you you will want to loosen this off not all the way but like you know just make sure it's pretty loose you can kind of judge it right here make sure this isn't jammed all the way in and then go ahead and crack your oxygen just turn the knob the general rule of thumb for oxygen is you can turn it pretty much all the way on and then the acetylene the general rule of thumb is just to crack it like a half turn or so just enough for your needles to move i think that's a safety feature acetylene is way more flammable than oxygen oxygen is flammable but it's not near as flammable i guess you'd say as acetylene so the that's why the practice on acetylene is just to turn it half a turn versus all the way on like we do with oxygen all right so i went around there and turned on my settling bottle my oxygen bottle's on and now i'm going to go over the proper way to set your pressure on your regulators for my oxygen all i'm going to do is either turn this knob on or easier ways just to pull your cutting lever and you can see my pressure needle is moving and whenever i tighten it my needle moves up so that's right there about 28 between 25 and 30 is where i want that so and then to do the acetylene the proper way is to crack your acetylene and then adjust your knob on your settling until it's where you want it and then you can turn this off and that's how you set your pressures on your regulators all right now that we've covered all the basics let's go ahead and actually light up our torch like i said earlier i'm going to crack my acetylene strike it you can see if i turn it down you see this black soot the idea is to turn it up until that black suit is not totally gone but way less and then reach up here to my oxygen knob and turn it on and these are the blue cones that i'm talking about right here the first thing that comes out of your torch tip the idea is to have them even i always start off by making sure they're even without hitting the cutting lever but then i also check it check the cones by hitting the cut and lever because sometimes them blue cones can appear even whenever you're not pressing on your lever then whenever you press on it you can see they get uneven so so pretty much what i'm saying is you want your cones even while you are pressing down on your cutting levers and this here is actually a dirty torch tip you can tell by the sound but also a good clean torch tip is usually the flame is usually whenever you press on your cutting lever is going to be way out here versus real short whenever your flame is short while you're pressing on your cutting lever that's a sign that your tip is dirty so it's short now let's clean the torch tip and then i'll show you what a clean torch tip flame looks like all right so i've just got through cleaning my torch tip you can see the end is nice and shiny now whenever you go to put your torch tip back in your torch the general rule of thumb is to set it in there and then kind of what they call seat it which just means make sure it's in the groove real good put your nut back on snug it down again same with the regulator not too tight because these are brass threads and they will stretch so put your nut on take your crescent and just kind of snug it down if for some reason after you've got your torch tip put in there and you light your torch and you go to cut and it starts to pop like you'll just hear random like pop pop pop it's either your rings down here that are bad something in here which i'm not a a torch mechanic by no means but there's there's rubber rings in here so either your torch is wore out so you need new rings down here somewhere in your torch or sometimes you can get away with just tightening this up just a little bit more and that'll get rid of a popping noise all right now let's hook it back up light it back up and hopefully get the sound of a nice clean torch tip crack our acetylene light it make sure the soot's gone away turn on our oxygen i don't know if you could hear that crackling noise or not but whenever i turn on my oxygen up here and it kind of crackled that was the little shavings that we had cleaned burning up so now we're gonna go ahead and adjust our flame you can already see that's a little bit longer i'm gonna press on the cutting lever you hear that see how my flame is way out here now that's how you know you got a clean torch tip is whenever your flame is longer the wind's kind of blowing that's why you see it fluctuating but uh or i hope you can see it on camera there maybe we can turn it this way yeah see how long that is that's the noise that i like to hear that's how you know you got a good clean torch tip all right one last thing before we talk about why we twist our torch hose this here is a hose repair kit i just wanted to mention it to you and show you what i like as far as repairing a torch hose so i can't remember this kit comes with several both sizes of connectors for your hoses they make a 3 16 hose and a 3 8 i have the 3 16 and so they make or these kits come with both sizes of connectors and they come with ways to splice a hose so you can make a hose longer and then they come with new crimps this is for the bigger hose i believe these right here for the smaller hose this is the size of crimp that i would need and this i can't remember if this kit come with this or this but it comes with one of them but i prefer this one and as you can see here here there's it's got a hole for both sizes of torch hoses i would use the smaller one that's the size of hose that i have and this is the tool that i prefer over the vice grip if you're going to be doing a lot of torch cutting on the daily like for a business i recommend having one of these on your truck because dragging this thing up and down the ground every day chances are you're gonna have or if you drop a piece of metal on or something and it cuts it you're gonna need to repair something at some point and so that's handy if you are in a bind and don't have any crimps you can get away with baling wire right here i've seen that i think i've even used it one time whenever i was in a bind so the main reason that i tried twisting this was because years ago some guys i was working with on on drilling rigs had their hose twisted and i was like why do you do that and they said well i think their reason was kind of the same reason as a whip if you've seen my welding lead video i talked about the reason for a whip and that's kind of the same reason as for comfort so that's kind of the the main reason another reason that i've found that i kind of like it is because it doesn't kink as bad if you don't have a reel like i've got up here if you just have your hose wrapped up like i do here and that's how you store it just essentially like i do my my welding lead whenever you throw off some loops and you take off to your project sometimes if it's not twisted it'll kink real bad and you'll cut off your your fuel supply it'll essentially act like your bottles will turn your bottles are turned off just like a kink in a water hose so that's one of the reasons why i like it but as far as having it on a reel i would not do this again because twisting it takes up more room but if i was just going to be storing my lead on a hook then i would probably twist my whole hose just for the sake of less chance of kinking so that's the main reason i would say is for comfort and for better flexibility and less kinking i think that's going to cover it for the basics of torch cutting my advice for this week is take just as much time practicing with a cutting torch as you do running beads with a with your welding machine the better you can get with a torch it will actually help with your welding also because both of them depend on a steady hand and the better you are with a torch the better you will be with welding because if you can make your cut real good and your fit real good that's going to make your welding go a lot easier also so don't underestimate the time spent practicing with your hand torch also don't forget to text the word torch to 405-643-7176 to get all the part numbers for the victor brands of torches that the circle burners fit on and just the torch sets in general if you're looking for a torch set last but not least check out my website aroswelding.com for more helpful information or the shop website for welding gear welding shirt soapstone the circle burner blue book all kinds of different stuff over there at the a ross welding store thank you for your support thanks for watching and remember learn something every day

Channel: Austin Ross

Views: 669,428

Keywords: Austin ross, autin ross, aaron ross, arosswelding, a ross welding, Torch basics, cutting torch basics, welding, welder, cutting torch, welding torch, torch cutting, torch cutting basics, welding basics, welding techniques, biggest secret to making a clean cut, clean cut, torch techniques, make a clean cut using a cutting torch, welding torch basics, how to use a cutting torch

Id: 2DFf0PBV1ik

Length: 25min 8sec (1508 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 28 2022