Oxy-Acetylene Cutting | Shake Hands With Danger!

gentlemen welcome back to the shop which a November comes stealing Nicole Durden gold diggers hurt with a gleam in her eye we're gonna it's been a while since I shook hands with danger you're gonna do some poppers with my old buddy Terry the torch that is the oxy-acetylene Rick I haven't run the thing in a while and I got some her talks to cut so yeah the next season at Nordstrom's you'll see these 170 bucks a bargain to be so fashion-forward mistake the first very seldom made by experienced fellas is that you want to get your apprentice in here buddy old pal if I got a job for you ah and so forth you ain't doing oh let's just get this plate over and make sure we don't get pinched thingies as I was saying smoke them if you got them if you got an apprentice you're gonna want him to hurt whoever slang your steel for you a little bit tough to do single-handed in the dark but I've managed before all right I dug out the two Steel's mild steel and ar500 it's not armor plate its abrasion resistant 500 is quite hard you don't necessarily these two materials are so different they're both Steel's but they're so different they might as well be different materials this ar500 plate is very very hard its abrasion resistant the 500 denotes how hard it is in any case you can tell the difference by the initial twang when you strike it with a hammer the harder it is the higher that initial twinging now that the length of the ringing just depends on how hard you hit it really but that initial playing is what tells you how hard it is we're gonna cut both of these with a thermal process well we're gonna oxidize them essentially this guy is inch and a half that guy has got to be an inch the thermal process for this inch one we could almost get away with using the plasma cutter for this guy no way we use the temperature the high temperature to heat up the steel so that it's ready for a very rapid chemical reaction then we oxidize it in the place of in with the plasma cutter we inject just compressed air of course come ere don't don't tell this to anybody what fills our tires with pure nitrogen but air is boats 80% nitrogen already so why the er put in $10 worth of nitrogen and your tires are you stupid that's a rhetorical question if there are guys I've got to go to 11 but it's the same process whether we use oxy acetylene or plasma we are oxidizing the steel and in steel the oxidization is an exothermic process so once we get it started it wants to continue and it's just in the hands of a skilled or in my case unskilled operator that we allow that chain reaction to continue and whip ourselves off buck ourselves off around now this mild steel very little carbon in it it's going to be the easiest to cut this hard ox here or ar500 plate it's going to be quite a bit more difficult one because there's more carbon in there of course graphite graphite does not like to burn carbon it's difficult unless it's a hydrocarbon itself is difficult to burn and the it's got way far more alloying elements in this case very likely manganese which work hardens that's what you want you want sticks and stones hitting this and you want it to toughen up you'll never get this mild steel to toughen up because there's not enough carbon in there and there's no loyal iment we got the regs and the torch body as well is the cutting torch head this is one of them things you're likely well no likely about it you're far better off getting hands-on course because there's certain actually you got to take certain actions there's also high consequence to up and you get explosive gas mixtures and so forth so one of those cases where you just don't want to run ocean and buy a one of these things and hook her up and hope for the best you really want to get some tutelage the torch itself we got the cutting tip here and looking at it's way too small for this size of material if we look at it it's a BOC yeah it says right on there half inch getting into the oxygen rake here we have well this is a pressure reducing valve a pressure reducing valve controls the downstream pressure and see the gauge goes to 4,000 psi in the tank and then drops down to maximum 200 psi you'll never to use 200 psi but it's on the gauge and the pressure reducing valve as opposed to a pressure relief valve a pressure relief valve controls the pressure upstream of the valve and a pressure reducing valve downstream of the valve this is the same kind of valve what's in a scuba regulator any any kind of hydraulic system that needs a set pressure and you don't want to screaming over the relief all the time so this is a very common valve there's a diaphragm in there backed with the spring and we adjust the pressure by spinning a thing in the tourney bit on the fluid connections cute little detail here so you don't blow yourself up so you can't put these on backwards you can still put them on backwards or wrong thread or so forth there's the thing you invent some midea proof the world invents a better idiot this is right hand thread this guy is left hand sir thread so you can't intermix them and you can tell their left hand thread because they got little notches here despite having the wrong tip we could still cut this and it just make a meal out of it and make it an awful mess so I got some half-inch plate we're gonna acetylene is the queen of combustible gases unlike that bastard gas butane taste the meat not right it is also very dangerous now as a regent is it a regent because it is dangerous or is it dangerous because it is regent unless that's a little question for philosophers out there but acetylene is dangerous because at any pressure above 30 psi which is not very much as 2 atmospheres it will self decompose violently if you look at the molecule it's a linear molecule and it's a very light hydrocarbon it's so light in fact it's lighter than air one gram per liter at atmospheric pressure 20 you say well room temperature whereas air is 1.25 grams that's actually a good feature because it's lighter than air it floats up it doesn't it doesn't pool in low areas the way propane does acetylene very useful in heavy industry because it has such a hot flame 6000 degrees Frankenstein three thousand roughly centigrade coarse steel melts at a nearly white-hot 1,500 degrees centigrade and if you look at if you're using propane the flame temperatures but 2,000 centigrade so it's real close the flame temperature is real close to the melting point already so it when you're cutting with propane yeah it's cheap but it's also a pain in the Earth's because you get all kinds of water and all kinds of condensation on your steel and it's it's just not nearly as hot acetylene very forgiving because it's so jeez less hot however it is not forgiving in that it degrades spontaneously there's two factors there's two methods that they use to mitigate that anything above 30 psi and any kind of shock or any kind of / temper flame that's why we have the flashback arrestors will set this off explosively so what we do is we fill the cannister the cylinder here it gets filled with a very porous inert rock-like substance start like the firebrick but very very very small pores and the acetylene is not in gaseous form it's actually solute in a Sullivant that is acetone so this is full of acetone and that is why you do not want to run this on its side because there's a liquid in here intuitively it doesn't seem that there'd be much room at all for any gas to hang out in there seeing this how its right full of liquid well any amount of gas but the thing is the solubility of acetone in oh the solubility of acetylene in acetone is about 30 grams per kilogram and that's at atmospheric pressure so we go up to 250 you're probably looking at 10 times that so you get 300 grams per kilogram there's maybe 2 kilograms in here and recall that the gas density is 1 gram per liter so you're looking at roughly 600 liters worth of acetylene at atmospheric pressure contained in this little guy unless I'm dropping the zero maybe that's more like 60 anyway there's law there's plenty of gas in there because it's so soluble in acetone of course being a hydrocarbon it's it's an oil product they used to make it by putting calcium carbide in water that's also how they used to make calcium carbide lamps underground now that doesn't strike me as a particularly good idea that you would have a combustible gas that's highly reactive underground especially in a coal mine where there's already lots of dangerous stuff what will kill you and that method of producing acetylene went the way of the dodo generally now I believe it's made in refineries it's a well it's a very volatile hydrocarbon and they just pick it up when they're cooking off the dinosaur squeezings now this was a mystery to me for a long time you cannot put any kind of oil any of the oxygen fittings of course as dictated by this it's a UN well it's a heavy oxidizer it's right there in the name oxygen it can flag your rates if it comes into contact with any flammable materials but here we have some plastic tape I would think that plastic is quite combustible so how are they allowed to how are they getting away with using plastic tape to seal as well this is a fluoropolymer instead of binding with oxygen it's it's inert it's already been bound with fluorine and fluorine happens to grab at the other atoms a lot harder than it grabs then oxygen does so this tape is wholly inert it will decompose at higher temperatures but at a regular temperature it will not burn now they got this stuff every words it's soapy water but it's very bubbly and far too cheap to waste any gas besides the fact that it's also kind of dangerous if anything is a leakin so we just want to crack that we want to make sure that our rag is out we cracked that I was always taught to backseat it a lot of guys prefer just to crack it so they could thing close it quick but if you're up the backseat school and you back her off until she's hard up against the stop you can see we got but 800 psi no oh we got 1200 psi reading the wrong side of the gauge there 1200 psi and 200 psi on that that's not right Oh 30 keep reading the wrong cage here okay so let's open that up and now we will you got to have the valve open when you adjust it so we are gonna want that oxygen at around 30 I believe I found an agnostic chart no particular brand name 3 corridor to an inch 3/8 to 3 that's the the orifice size 58 oxygen 3240 acetylene five psi and we're happy happy there no or not I got some mermaids wasting money I'll give this a go cutting and what we're gonna do the prep it's all about the proper it's the same as painting you want a good paint job it's all about the prep so if you want a nice cut first off you got to have a nice guide we guide it up here and unfortunately the striker I prefer to use a striker but it's in the land of ten millimeter sockets just gone so we'll lightly apply the acetylene later up you see all the soot parachutists that is the carbon in that acetylene not getting enough oxygen so it's burning the hydrogen but it's not burning the carbon we're gonna add some oxygen and it pops up and now we'll hit the Jets now we're good to go I've taken the liberty of cleaning up all the combustible materials and having a fire extinguisher around you would not believe the amount of doe heads that set themselves on fire on a regular we've all done it 1 2 dozen times but eventually even I learned so we're going to get the hottest part of that preheat flame right in there you can see the nice warm glow of the acetylene fire and then we're going to blaster with the oxygen jet from the middle that reaction is going to self-perpetuate because it's exothermic that oxidizing the action is exothermic and then it's just a matter of going at the right speed now the slag melts at a slightly higher temperature and that's why it can stay behind and reweld itself together but as you saw no structural integrity and that's the difference between steel and aluminum um is that the oxide of steel is pretty close to the same melting temperature as the base metal whereas in a low minimum it's much much much higher that makes it a pain in the cunning linguist to weld aluminium is because you got to break through that oxide layer before you can get down to the base metal and also that oxide layer in a low minimum is an insulator electrical insulator whereas it's fair to middlin electrical conductor in steel it just makes steel that much easier to weld I'm on the concrete floor here and if I was doing any heavy cutting and I was worried about the floor I'd put a little tin plate down there just something to catch the slag because it will pop off chunks out of it'll spall the surface of the concrete and what you can do is sort of watch what the slag underneath is doing those molten balls and if it's coming out nice and straight you know you're doing a good job if it's off all every which word yeah you've got to slow down or speed up so you see that guy that's actually worse than the first cut is going to slow you can see the top of the kerf they're all melted over and then all kinds of slag remelt it instead of just blasting it out of the hole so we'll try it again once again for the third time and go a little bit faster and see what we get some sparks we know we're hot enough now we're going to go a little bit faster as you can see by the slag not coming out the bottom side so we're gonna have a great glob of a slag at the bottom of the cut you see how the kerf curved backwards it's not straight up and down it means I was going too fast and not giving it enough time to clear the cut that's why it's always important to do a little bit of a test Kotik if ever you can just like you always do a little bit of a test bead if you're welding want to make sure everything's working and if it's not make adjustments so let's have a look at our settings here and right off the hop not enough oxygen right around 20 psi we want to be around 35 so either I dickard with that or we run it out up or I didn't do it probably rookie mistake I didn't adjust it while the gas was flowing [Music] you see there's nothing coming out of the cut there so you got to slow down and make sure you clearing totally that up compeletely it up you see it ain't easy you got to get your settings right I'm rolling over that edge way too much heat and then letting it ball up and so you can really see the appeal of a plasma cutter because the results you get are so much cleaner the day is the moral and I like many of you and rightly so I've been accused of sandbagging on occasion that's an arrow we all hold in reserve in our quiver in the face of middle management mediocrity and corporate buffoonery sometimes you just don't want to show them all the cards you got in your hand however in this case has witnessed to the Housewives of Instagram welders I suck at this plane is simple there is nothing so humiliating and humility humility inspiring than to come up against a seemingly simple challenge and find yourself wanting note by the mint they I prefer to poll on account of being a monkey you got two trees climbing trees and so forth you're far stronger more stable when you pull it of course as a younger man you got to be careful not to pull the head over clean off but the disadvantage of what we're doing here which is pushing the advantage of course it's pushing we can see in the cut we can see all that slag we can see when it changes state the disadvantage begin it's like your last Saturday night a party in your mouth and everybody's coming Lady Gaga had a song about that poker face the getting the cut there you can see what's going on you're melting the steel away you can change see it change state but the problem is you get cocked up a little bit hot shmoo in your face hey ain't too nice in your eye Oh while I'm at it might as well get them all uh what's the difference between jelly and jam well I ain't gonna jelly it in your face her face yeah getting take too many tries left in that tank this is an interesting lesson in hubris for me because I had previously mastered this and I assumed that it was like riding a bike but it ain't like riding a bike because there's a feel to it there's an art to the science so I wasn't getting it you saw what I did well here's the thing we all work in three dimensions four dimensions if you include time and some people can't even work in those four dimensions we all know people who can't drive or the and you're only working in two dimensions plus time you're only working in three dimensions so if it gets too complicated you're not getting it you got to take a step back so this is actually there's a ton of variables a lot of dimensions here you're looking at your gas pressure you're looking at your oxygen pressure you're looking at your distance I guess that's a dimension you're looking at your travel speed that's like seven dimensions and if you're not getting it you got to scale that back you take dimensions away with a few little tricks I took one of the dimensions away because I went hard up against this stop and then just dragged along I took away the dimension of the Zed height with this this guy until I got it I don't like to give myself crutches and this sometimes these are hard to come by so if you rely on one of these all the time to set your Zed depth then you're gonna run into an occasion where you either can't use one of these or you don't have one and now you're hooped oh there you go that's about as good as I need it's amazing to me how adaptable the human mind is if you you know the feedback loops all those variables if you need it to program a machine to do that it takes you a month of Sundays yeah and this isn't even you know we're just we're just taking advantage of the learning curve here I'm here at 30 minutes if I were to spend an extra 10,000 hours I'd be here but I don't want to spend that ten thousand hours good enough for the girls I go out with it all comes down to that old adage practice makes perfect I grant you this is likely not the most advisable method of burning off excess acetylene but it is the funnest Oh for the love of Pete ah hat yet playing thanks for watching you'll be digging a voice

Channel: AvE

Views: 952,210

Keywords: oxy, cutting, torch, blacksmith, welding, engineering

Id: oKhhWGhBkYo

Length: 23min 37sec (1417 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 04 2019