How To Set Up A New Acetylene Torch

hello everyone welcome back to steel forest welding and forge today we're going to cover how to set up a brand new acetylene torch from start to finish all right guys before we get started i want to give you some quick safety tips now number one fairly obvious but i'm gonna say it anyway do not have any ignition sources or open flames near your torch setup acetylene is an extremely volatile gas it will explode and explodes big time there's a reason we use it to cut metal that burns at twenty two thousand three hundred degrees fahrenheit gets very hot burns very quickly number two always store your settling tank and your oxygen tank in an upright position now acetylene tanks are a bit of a unique beast oxygen tanks this is just an empty cylinder basically with compressed oxygen inside acetylene tanks however this has a porous almost sponge-like structure on the inside of the tank now acetylene is dissolved in acetone and what happens is as the acetylene separates from acetone naturally in this upright position the acetylene is what goes into your regulator and not your torch tip what can happen when this is turned on its side is this can prematurely separate the ass the acetylene from the acetone and it creates a bubble this bubble can then go into your regulator and pour like an acetylene and acetone liquid mixture into your line that is what causes what can cause flashback so very important to keep this guy stored upright at all times when you buy your tank from your gas supplier more than likely you will have to transport that tank in your car laying flat now traveling with it flat in the flat flat position for a little bit is just fine uh you don't want to lay it flat for any longer than i believe 48 hours anything longer than that and i'm not exactly sure what the implications are we were just told not to do it in school once you get it back home store in the upright position make sure you have it secured to something some kind of cart in this case or if you have it against the wall have it secured with chains uh you can hear the birds chirping right now i've actually got my window open because uh i did all this demonstrations before i made this part of the video now secondly uh make sure again they're secured to something i prefer a torch card this makes it more mobile um but have these chained up tight don't have like a loose chain up on here we're slightly bumping him can make him fall over bang around fall down it's just not worth it spend some money spend some time have a nice setup nice secure setup however you do it let's see where we at here number four have some kind of extinguisher nearby i have a very large fire extinguisher in my garage within reach at all times you never know what's gonna happen you never know when you're gonna get a leak you never know when something's gonna catch on fire we're gonna throw a spark so has some kind of fire extinguisher on standby and then last but not least whenever you're actually using your torch eye protection and body protection wear non-flammable clothing wear clothing that is possible heat resistant this is a mostly wool shirt don't wear polyester i have denim jeans on i have closed toed work boots and i also have a special uh mask specifically designed for cutting with an acetylene torch so have the proper pve as well all right now that that's all taken care of let's get to putting the storage set together all right folks let's go ahead and get our torch set up you have to forgive the angle i'm not exactly a professional but i think you guys will get the uh the gist of what i'm about to do so to put this torch set together we're going to need a large and medium-sized crescent wrench just any random size wrench you have this we'll be using later on and that's really it now one safety point i want to stress here is that when it comes to brass fittings we do not use thread tape thread tape can actually lead to leaks we use brass because they're soft slightly malleable and they create a good seal and also because we are using brass threads we do not want to over tighten just a snug fit is all we need so right here we have our oxygen regulator and the folks at vulcan did a good job of color coding everything here pretty much anyone can put these together now we want this here to be loose this is to adjust the pressure on our regulator the more you turn this in the higher your pressure when we install this we don't want a whole lot of pressure hitting our regulator sort of loosen that until it's fairly loose now this particular brand here the vulcan performer 2.0 series these actually have built-in flash arresters if you buy a different set i cannot recommend enough you purchase a set of flash arresters flash arresters will prevent a back flame from going through your torch into your tank and the whole thing is blowing up so we're gonna take our oxygen regulator or take our hose set here and they have this brass coupling on here all this does is hold these tubes together now further down the line these hoses are actually connected but up here towards the top they're loose so we're going to slide this down to give us some slack just like so and we're going to go ahead and we're going to attach the green line which is dedicated to oxygen to our oxygen regulator so right there fittings are touching i am not even going to turn this a quarter of a turn that's all you need and set this aside now we're gonna set up the acetylene regulator and again we're gonna loosen that valve until it's fairly loose you don't want to fall apart now you'll notice here that this is a different looking fitting now this is a very common feature i'm about to show you on acetylene valves if you look at this valve you can see that there are small notches cut into this valve this is an indicator that these threads are reversed so in other words instead of righty tighty lefty loosey it's lefty tighty righty loosey now they do this so that people don't get confused and mix up their oxygen and acetylene lines once they attach their torch as you can see here on this line this has the same notches cut into it this is again reverse threads so we're going to throw this on the regulator without using tape we're going to turn it to the left to tighten it until it touches again that's all i'm going to do not much let's see if i break that loose really takes any effort just snug with brass fittings you do not want to over tighten so we have both of our regulators set up now i'm going to set up the torch base this has quite a bit of memory to it these lines so if you look at your torch base here you can see we have f and o o stands for oxygen f stands for fuel this torch is actually compatible with also propene propane and um la gas or lp gas so we're going to go ahead and hook our oxygen up to the o for oxygen same concept here no thread on the tapes that's going to be hand tight and just the slightest tightening on the valve next is our settling line again you can see we have not just cut into this valve that indicates reverse threads i want to turn this one to the left to tighten it and be sure you never cross thread your threads if you do this on brass fittings they are ruined you'll need to replace whatever fitting your room oh you ruined it you do not want leaky lines on a torch setup for obvious reasons get that to hand tight again just a little itty bitty tightening that's it all right this is for the most part done now i'm gonna go ahead and take the torch head here now this tip does not screw on for this particular torch setup you unscrew the head of your torch drop your torch head into this nut like so and go ahead and just tighten it back onto the head now again brass threads same concept do not over tighten so give that a quick little snug that is done i'm not going to go ahead and bother attaching the torch head to the base here quite yet it's just going to get in the way for our next step now this here is a elbow for welding you can see that just has a single orifice this here is a rosebud this has multiple orifices this is used for heating a large area of material all right let's go ahead and go over to the tanks and i'm going to show you how to set up the rest of this torch set all right guys so we're looking at our torch setup here this tank right here is our acetylene tank and this tank right here is our oxygen tank typically when you buy a torch set up you're settling a settling tank is going to be a little bit smaller than your oxygen tank now the size of your tank is going to depend on what you're doing if you're going to be doing a lot of cutting a lot of brazing a lot of preheating you may want to consider buying a larger tank setup this guy right here is going to suit my needs just fine i actually probably went up a size and i thought i had to just in case these tanks end up being a little bit too small i'm going to be using these mostly for local heating for hand forging and as luck would have it i actually just got a client this week that uh requested that i braise some cast iron form so this torch setup is going to be perfect for that now a lot of times when you get these torches from a dealer these caps could be on kind of tight so what you're going to want to do is just take any normal wrench you can thread this right into this eye like so let's see this one's loose they have these eyes you can just put your wrench right into the eye of that opening like so put that in go and give that a little crank and that'll pop that cap right off let's go ahead and take off those caps there's one there's two now one little trick to getting your tanks set up is that a lot of times these tanks unless they're really big they're gonna not quite fit on your cart one thing that you can do to kind of keep the bottoms from shifting around take one of your put it caps in between the two tanks right here and that'll keep those tanks from bouncing into each other and also for moving back and forth on your torch cart just kind of one more way to kind of snug things down now i have these straps loose so i can move these tanks around you'll see why in a minute and we're going to go ahead and continue this torch setup now one thing that i want to stress to you guys is for the love of god whatever you do do not drop your regulators i can almost promise you that if you drop your regulators on a hard surface like a concrete floor which i have these things are going to be a hunk of junk basically scrap metal so be very careful not to drop your regulators also on a safety note always use a regulator never hook a line directly into your tank regulators will regulate the pressure coming out of your tank for example the pressure coming out of this tank here probably something like 1500 psi once it goes to the regulator it's gonna be something like 35 so do the math you don't want that much pressure coming out now when you set up your torch typically when you push your cart towards your project uh you know that's gonna be facing your project so you want your regulators facing out from your cart not back the other way you want to be able to see your dials it seems like an obvious thing but believe me just having this on the wrong side makes your setup a lot a lot more difficult than it has to be whenever you're hooking up a valve to a new tank you always need what's called crack the valve there's always a chance that some kind of insect made a nest in here or just dirt grime something got in here you do not want that going into your hoses it'll clog them up ruin them and give the potential for flashback so what we're going to do is we're just going to quickly turn this valve on and off now this can be pretty loud so always be careful and don't put your ear right next to it please so we're going to crack the action valve that wasn't too bad now that that's been cracked i'm going to carefully take my oxygen regulator i'm going to thread this on by hand as you can see here this dial is on upside down i don't want that so what i'm going to do is i'm going to spin this around this tank so this is facing the correct direction right there should be fine we're gonna thread that on by hand i'm gonna tip these valves up just slightly so when i look down i can see these numbers i'm going to gently tighten this with a crescent wrench again brass fittings do not over tighten quick little snug now one problem that you may run into when setting up your torch the fitting on these tanks may not fit the fittings on your regulator for example if you look at our acetylene regulator you can see male fitting nail valve rut rope so we are going to need to use an adapter now they make specialty adapters for settling tanks again you can see on one side we have these notches to indicate reverse threads on the other side there are no notches that indicates normal threads if you are not sure what kind of adapter you need you can actually look on your tank and on your fittings there are numbers typically on here engraved onto the brass so for example on this regulator here there is a number it says cga 510 that is the size of this valve and if you look on this tank here it says cga 300 that's the size so this is a 300 to 500 cga fitting now to put this on i'm going to go ahead and put it on this side first and again reverse threads so turn to the left to tighten all right go ahead and put one crescent wrench on here a second to tighten again brass threads do not over tighten just a quick little that's all you need see i'm going to bring this around on this side tighten this onto my tank now these are normal threads so righty-tighty lefty loosey now it is important that i put this side on first this is going to help hold a better seal if i tighten this valve onto here first i'm actually going to run out of threads here and that is going to pull this nozzle completely against the valve here and form a tight seal now you'll notice that i didn't bleed the line i actually already cleaned this valve off earlier i didn't feel like cracking the line and having a settling flood in my garage so just for the record i did already clean this valve off now again brass threads not over tightening just a quick little that's all you need now this valve's facing the wrong way so i'm going to turn that gently turn it okay i can see i got a little bit of a problem here looks like these if i keep turning this i'm going to pinch this line here but you also don't want this sticking out in case you bump into something i'm just going to turn it as much as i can loosen this back up point that valve down like so again a little less a little over a little overhand tight turn a little more there i'm happy with that go ahead and tighten my ratchet straps just to crank on them just get them tight give that a little shake whole thing's pretty secure all right let's go into the next step all right guys welcome back now i'm going to give you guys some general settings for your tanks now before we turn these on again want to make sure that your valve adjustments are loose this is what adjusts the pressure inside of your tank okay both feel kind of loose i'm going to go ahead and slowly crack this valve there now you can see this valve here shot up now what this valve roughly indicates to you is the amount of pressure inside your tank think of it as a fuel gauge i can see that our other needle here did not move this indicates the amount of pressure in your line this is open and loose so we have no pressure what i'm going to do is i'm just going to slowly turn this you'll see that dialing up good kind of neutral setting that i have found that works really well is about 35 psi now for your oxygen tank you can go ahead and open that up pretty far okay now for your settling tank however you only want to crack this valve this is in case of an emergency like perhaps you have a flashback in your line if you just crack your valve it's a lot easier just to turn that valve again off real quick at the source and starve that line of any fuel if you sit here and open this valve up all the way that takes more time so again those valve crack that open there we go our dial moved now a good setting for our acetylene is about seven psi so we're going to turn that until that needle starts to move there it goes there's six seven now these numbers are probably going to move while i well the first time i turn the torch on what we'll have to do is have to come back and adjust these once we've turned the torch on all right we're gonna do the last part of our torch setup here now i've had these valves open for a while one thing i'm going to do that's very important for you to do as well is just do i guess you call a sniff test acetylene has a very offensive odor to it when you smell leaking acetylene you are going to know it's leaking it's kind of like propane there's a smell associated with it so you know there's a leak the first time you do a torch setup make sure you just check for leaks best and probably the easiest way to do that is just give it a sniff test just kind of stick your nose up i can't smell any settling so it seems like this has a pretty good setup if you do smell acetylene shut everything off bleed your line which i'll show you to do later and then go through and just re tighten all your valves give them just a little bit more of a crank you know a little bit of a harder crank here here here just a little bit you might just have a very slight leak but again if you have leaky acetylene you're going to know it so i've got my torch head here torch body let's go ahead and feed that through here so the way i like to set a torch up so we have our valves here a torch head here i like to have my valves facing me not the other way around i don't like to put the head on like so i like it with the valves facing up so we're going to go ahead thread this on now typically with one of these fittings here you do not need to refund this at all just usually hand tight will do it okay so go ahead and tighten that by hand good now we have our main acetylene and oxygen line off now and this is another adjusting valve which i'll go over later so the first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to turn on my oxygen line pull that little trigger there that's going to allow some oxygen to come out i'm going to look at my valve i can see that i am in fact running at about 35 psi i'm going to turn that just a hair when i pull that trigger it is now coming out at third about 37 35 37 is a good general setting now it already had that action come out i had to pull that trigger all right i'm going to turn that oxygen off acetylene however does not go through this valve it goes through a different valve so when i turn this on a suddenly comes out right away so i'm going to crack that check my settings you'll want to fill your garage up with settling for obvious reasons okay so it looks like i have my settings correct so now we're gonna go ahead and fire this torch up make sure everything works and we're gonna have fire safety on standby just in case here we are for the last part of our torch setup now i moved my i'm gonna move away from my torch set here obviously so i don't blow myself up i've got the line stretched out without any kinks or knots in it i've also got gloves and safety glasses and a fire extinguisher on standby so what we're gonna do we're gonna go ahead and we're gonna open up the oxygen valve okay now again this is regulated through this dial here which i'll show you in a moment and through the cutting trigger so we have this valve completely off this is what adjusts our oxygen and fuel mixture now our acetylene what we're going to do is we're just going to crack this slightly so we have a gentle flame coming out of here we don't want a giant fireball so you do not want to crank this valve up just crack it slightly now we're going to use a flint striker you always want to use a flint striker and not an open flame for starting a torch so what i'm going to do i'm going to crack this valve i'm going to light the torch once this little area in here fills with the settling then i'm going to dial the torch in using this oxygen adjustment so here we go crack okay like this and have one correct oops if your flame dies close off your acetylene close off your oxygen try again new torch so i haven't done this before on this torch setup might take a little bit used to crack your acetylene a little more oxygen what about there's what you want see those little cones we're good to go giving a little bit more acetylene there we go that is a decent cutting torch right there want those little blue cones on there to be about 3 16 of an inch long that's good cutting temperature now shut this off we're just going to turn off our settling close the oxygen valve and then our torch is turned off we're going to close our tanks like so close our acetylene tank now we're going to bleed the lines because we're going to turn this valve run it until the oxygen stops same with our acetylene gone just give this gas a moment to disperse and then we're all done wrap up this hose and our torch setup is complete so hope you guys enjoyed the video please like and subscribe please check out our etsy store and look forward to some more uh how-to videos tool reviews and maybe even some demos thanks again guys

Channel: Steel Forest Welding and Forge LLC

Views: 326

Rating: 4.6666665 out of 5

Keywords: metal fabrication, handmade, diy, make, torch, Rosebud, acetylene, oxygen, oxy fuel, setup, garage, Shop, victor, blacksmith, handforge, cutting

Id: EJmAeac0lfU

Length: 28min 37sec (1717 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 11 2021