Let's Talk Oxy Acetylene

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I discovered a leak in my oxy-acetylene lines that I think I just fixed the oxy line was pretty bad but the acetylene also had a small leak that took some soapy water to find out I should probably change these lines out altogether these aren't that expensive maybe a dollar to a foot depending on the size at any rate a lot less expensive than blowing yourself up maybe a bit more hassle but definitely less expensive so since I have all this stuff out let's talk about oxy-acetylene shall we before I got the TIG this was my go-to welding rig for small stuff now it's mostly relegated to heating heating and bending breezing cutting and just general burnin aiding and melting before we get into the business end of things let's take another look at the bottles let's start there ignore that bottle on the left that's nitrogen n2 I use that to fill my air guns you're looking at oxygen in the middle and acetylene on the right the short one oh not do you know why acetylene is called acetylene do you know why it smells the way it does well neither do I but what I do know is just like my boy it's changed nice and solid to the wall they're not just sort of floating around hanging back here in the dark part of my shop on their own we're a Yank with the hose or a bump could knock them over if there's anything you take away from this video is that oxy acetylene and high-pressure cylinders in general have the potential to be extremely dangerous but they're safe if they're used with caution common sense and you play by the rules let's start with oxygen oxygen is a gas and a new bottle is usually filled about 2,000 guess I give or take that's about a hundred and forty bar and that's a lot of pressure to get that down to something that we can work with we need a regulator regulator is the thing that looks like a clock stuck to the top of the tank Welding regulators have two gauges usually the one closer to the valve tells you the pressure in the bottle or the cylinder as the pros call them you can tell I'm not a pro the other gauge tells you the working pressure coming into the hoses well being regulators are adjustable you turn the knob change the working pressure easy peasy my oxygen is currently set to about five psi the regulator is regulating high pressure oxygen 2000 psi for new bottle down to 5 psi now let's have a look at the acetylene in the bottle acetylene isn't a gas well it is but it's dissolved in a liquid it's dissolved in acetone well it's complicated acetylene is unstable above 15 to 20 psi or so so it can't be shipped on its own like oxygen is I've got my craftsman x-ray inspection tool let's have a look inside inside the steel shell of the cylinder is a porous matrix kind of like that big hard sponge you have in the utility sink you really should throw that away it's getting kind of gross the matrix is filled with acetone don't quote me on this but it might be about 50% acetone the acetylene gas is dissolved into that acetone sort of like co2 is dissolved in your soda before you open it that makes sense when you crack the can open the co2 starts to bubble out that's more or less what happens with acetylene that's what keeps it stable that by the way is also the reason you should never use acetylene bottles on their side or after they've been laying on their side like in the trunk your car you should let them settle overnight or so now I know there's someone out there right now commenting that they've used their acetylene bottle completely upside down hanging from the ceiling for the past 30 years and nothing Bad's ever happened the point is you shouldn't do it it's very dangerous anyway just like the oxy bottle this also has a regulator the scale is a little bit different because of the operating pressures of acetylene but it's the same principle and again mine is currently set to about 5 psi my rig is actually a little bit big for the kind of stuff that I do these days so honestly I've never really done very big work I mean this is by no means a big torch but I would love one of those little mini oxy-acetylene torches the good ones are just so dang expensive though but these things are so versatile I wouldn't be without one I mean if you've ever watched the a-team you know just how multifunctional and plot critical an oxy acetylene torch can be in order to provide you with the absolute most bang for you YouTube buck and to stretch the soup a little bit let's get a smidge techie here let's get into the numbers now just like the Wonder Twins acetylene and oxygen on their own are absolutely marvelous but you put them together and that's when the magic happens acetylene is c2h2 and oxygen is o2 when you put those together and burn them like any hydrocarbon you get carbon dioxide and water co2 and h2o I'm sure you probably get all sorts of other weird stuff but the majority will be co2 and h2o what we just wrote here is a bit of an equation but if you look close both sides aren't balanced we have more C's H s and O's on one side than we do on the other hey that reminds me of that old joke how did it go what did the baby acorn say when it grew up stoichiometry no wait wait I told that wrong what did the baby Russian ACORN say I don't know let's move on let's see what happens when we try to balance our checkbook here it's been a while but we'll start with the O - that looks easy sitting there all by itself now on the left we have 102 two oxygen atoms on the right we have two in the carbon dioxide and one in the water so there's three there we can't add another oxygen by itself on the left so let's double the h2o just to even it all out now we have four oxygens on the right we'll add a two on the left to get us to O twos so four oxygen atoms on the left four oxygen atoms on the right and when we doubled that water we also doubled the hydrogen's so let's double the number of hydrogen's we have on the left two h2s on the left the acetylene and two h2s on the right in the water so now what happened we've got the oxygen sorted out got the hydrogen sorted out but when we doubled the h2s on the Left we also doubled the carbons we essentially have four on the left in the acetylene and one on the right in the co2 so let's put four carbon atoms on the right-hand side to match the four carbon atoms on the left just like before we fix the carbons but we broke the oxygens on the right we now have four o2s from the carbon dioxide and 102 from the water for a total of five oxygen pairs on the right let's just change our two to a five and I think this thing's worked out now we have the same number of carbons hydrogen's and oxygens on the left than we do on the right now if you're wondering why I went through all of this I can't blame you but take a look at what happened in order to get complete combustion of the acetylene and the oxygen for every two parts of acetylene we need five parts of oxygen to completely burn it and if we set up our torch to do that to sort of meter those proportions of acetylene and oxygen we end up with what's called a neutral flame and we'll see that in a minute when we lighter up a neutral flame produces carbon dioxide and water alternatively you could adjust the torch so you have an excess of oxygen or in excess of acetylene if you have too much oxygen you have an oxidizing flame if you have too much of settling you have a carburizing flame all right well we're not quite down to brass tacks but we are almost cooking with gas I picked up some new tips for my torch tips can be cleaned with a special tip cleaner but sooner or later they wear out and you need new ones tips are sized by orifice diameter either the size of the hole or some made-up number like a number two or number four the local shop didn't have all the tips that I needed but he didn't have this sweet size nozzle at a really good price I think I'm gonna get to like this one it's now my smallest one what you're looking at is three nozzles for heating and welding or braising and a cutting head we'll get to this later the largest one you see here is the one that gets the most use at least for me for heating and braising you kind of want a large soft flame instead of a needle-like pinpoint you might for welding let's get the small one on and light it up now the torch has two knobs on it one for each gas and I'll be using these to adjust the balance for the flame now because this is a smaller tip I've also dropped the pressure at the regulator's the working pressures you set on the regulator are based on the tip or the nozzle and that's sort of based on the work you're trying to do the bigger the work the bigger the tip the higher the pressure check the literature from your torch manufacturer to find out exactly what pressure is those should be those are very important to both your safety and having a good time with one of these things you should use a striker to light up your torch I've always been taught not to light a torch with an open flame like a lighter for example and I'm not exactly sure why that is to be honest if anybody knows the sort of official reason I'd love to hear about it the only thing I've ever been able to think of is maybe the torch pressure could blow out your open flame like you try to light the torch with your lighter and it just blows the lighter out like a birthday candle then you might be in a situation where you've got your torch you know putting out a deadly mix of acetylene and oxygen and you're you know trying to strike your lighter back up anyway I'm gonna light just the acetylene I don't know how well you can see it but there's a lot of soot coming off of that flame that's all carbon now what you're looking at here is the acetylene flame from before no oxygen and you're looking through a pair of welding goggles I start to slowly open the oxygen up and you may or may not see three flame cones in their outer cone the inner cone and the smallest one nearest the nozzle I can continue to open the oxygen until that middle cone and the small cone sort of become one right there our checkbook is balanced and we have a neutral flame this is the flame you'd use probably 99% of the time now there's something else going on here you may have never thought about the flame is conveniently staying put it's attached to the tip of the nozzle now what's happening is there's a flame front the flame is trying to burn its way up that gas sort of like when you light a fuse fire you know would run up the fuse the flame isn't moving because the gas is coming at it as fast as it's trying to burn it in our fuse analogy the fuse is moving closer to the fire at the same speed that the fire is trying to climb up the fuse so we have a bit of a balancing act gas coming out the nozzle to certain speed and flame trying to burn its way back into that gas if the pressure is set too low on your regulators you could end up in a situation where that flame speed exceeds the speed of the gas and the flame comes into the nozzle comes into the torch it starts to burn its way up to that fuse back to the balls that gave me chills just saying that out loud the term for that is flashback and in your lines at some point maybe two points you should have installed flashback arrestors these are basically like thermal check valves that should break the link if a flame makes it this far back in the tubing so my hoses are springing more leaks the guy at the welding supply laughed at me you know isn't there not two days ago the guy said these nozzles look pretty old you sure your hoses are still okay and I said yeah I want some cheesy poof's yeah my hoses are still okay don't try to upsell me I'm not an idiot so I went in got new hose and he up sold me on new flashback arrestors so all kidding aside what I'm really trying to do here is maybe provide some additional insight some information you might not find in other videos there's literally a ton of videos on YouTube on this subject and I know because I've weighed them all right so it's been a while but I've got just some scraps of Steel try to lay down some welds when you like the torch start with the fuel first with the acetylene some people like to open both of these so they're not getting as Cydia of flame and making a mess but that's actually quite dangerous the acetylene on its own that the pressures will be welding with isn't as dangerous as an oxy acetylene mix to keep it from making such a mess just open it up a little bit more so a small flame pretty dirty give it some pressure starts to clean up I'm like before slowly I'd the oxygen reduce the acetylene to get the balance right to get us to a neutral flame I'd hope this would go without saying but I'm gonna say it the flame is very hot I mean if you've never used an oxy acetylene torch before you likely have no real reference for just how hot this thing is you don't think my word for it let's see what the thermal camera says be very mindful of where you point this thing I know I know it'll be just a second you just need that one thing a couple of steps away you'll just put the torch down and be right back if it's not in your hand turn the torch off then you give it a minute to start the puddle and just let the puddle tell you when it's time to move on or add filler [Music] maybe easier said than done but that's the moral of the story all right that was actually harder than I remembered it I actually did three in order to get sort of the shots you just saw in the video compared to the TIG torch this thing weighs a ton feels like I'm trying to arm wrestle somebody while I'm welding I still think oxy acetylene is the way to start I think gas welding gives you a little bit more insight into what's happening gives you a little bit more time to respond and develop sort of the skills and the eye to recognize what's going on and adjust for it and I think it's a more intuitive sense of like heat control the torch angle you know stuff that happens lightning fast maybe with TIG and especially with MIG but maybe that's just the way I came into the hobby I just put the cutting head on it might look a little complicated but there's really not too much to it anyway same adjustments as before acetylene and oxygen to get a so neutral flame and then there's an additional oxygen valve now cutting requires a lot more oxygen than welding did even a modest-sized tip likeness I don't remember the number exactly but this will cut some ridiculous thicknesses steel let's take a look at the difference between a welding head and a cutting head the welding head has only one orifice on the center the cutting head has a lot more than one the six jets around the perimeter are sort of the preheat flame that's where you heats coming from and the jet in the middle is oxygen that's what I'll be doing the cutting the reason this has holes all the way around that center point the center hole is to allow you to move in any direction with the torch like you cut a circle by standing in one place without having to walk completely around your workbench now in my particular torch I open the oxygen on the body into the handle all the way and let the one on the cutting head control the mixture the button serves as a bypass it steps right around that button and sends sort of your full pressure air through the cut just like before you adjust the oxygen and acetylene balance to sort of reduce that inner cone to match in this case the six cones around the edge to get the neutral flame you can push the button once or twice and see what the balance looks like when you have excess oxygen and tweak it if you like the torch will and should sound a little more violent when you hit the lever and you start running a higher pressure oxygen through that tip now to be honest I'm a little hesitant about doing this cutting here in my garage this is gonna shoot sparks everywhere I've kind of barricaded the top of my workbench I'm going to try to keep this to a minimum but you know what kind of video would it be if I didn't do any cutting I'm gonna start off by letting the Jets heat up the work sort of melt the steel when I see a small puddle I started to form I can hit the lever and start cutting here's a little interesting tidbit once that steel starts cutting once it started to melt you technically don't need the acetylene anymore I remember my instructor was particularly fond of doing that demonstration as he was cutting it cut the acetylene and finished the cut with just the oxygen basically once the material gets to sort of that auto-ignition temperature the temperature were it would just sort of spontaneously burn as long as you feed it enough oxygen it'll keep burning on its own when you make a cut with an oxy acetylene torch you're basically making it rust very very very fast until it breaks part in two pieces they didn't get into a lot of the very specific details it was more about the torch and the torch setup and maybe it helps make a little bit more sense of some of the terms and reasoning you might hear on other YouTube channels I happen to really like Jodi over welding tips and tricks and would highly recommend his channel to anyone interested in welding or fabricating in general all right so what did you think of it you'll learn something cool [Music]

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Channel: This Old Tony

Views: 936,727

Rating: 4.9410763 out of 5

Keywords: oxyacetylene, oxy, acetylene, gas welding, cutting with a torch, oxyfuel, welding with a gas torch

Id: -uPAjIOkLVA

Channel Id: undefined

Length: 18min 51sec (1131 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 06 2016

Reddit Comments

When asking why it's called "Acetylene" - that name is a total abortion.

It can be broken in to two halves - Acetyl, which is a methyl group attached to an oxygen atom. "ene" refers to a double bond between two carbon atoms.

Acetylene contains neither an Acetyl group, nor a carbon double bond.

It's real name is ethyne. "Eth" for two carbons, and "yne" for two carbons with a triple bond. When describing hydrocarbons, we assume that any spare carbon bonds are taken up by hydrogen atoms, which is the case here.

As carbons like to make four bonds, and each of them already has three bonds to the other carbon, that means that each carbon has one hydrogen attached to it.