- Joined
- Aug 26, 2013
- Messages
- 358
Thanks everyone for all of the great information. I really had no idea how any of these burners worked before and I learned a lot from this thread.
The good news is that I was able to accomplish the task of achieving constant, lower temps in my forge tonight and now I'm set up much better than before to get more consistent heat treat results. At least I think I am.
The solution was a lot easier and cheaper than I thought... a $24 torch from HF. The Atlas burner is great for what it is designed to do and that is achieve forging temps in a small forge. I decided rather than trying to make it do something it wasn't designed to do, or building a new forge or buying a much more expensive venturi burner with a larger turndown ratio I'd just try a low output torch for HT and then still have the Atlas burner for achieving higher temps.
There were a few things I had to do to make it work: switch the burner, make the front of the forge the new back and the old back the new front, cover the old front port with a home made firebrick/thermocouple holder leaving just a very small opening on that port. Now I feed the blade into the muffle pipe through the old smaller back port. The thermocouple in the ceramic sheath sits inside the muffle pipe but enters in from the new back of the forge. This is actually much better anyway because it gets me away from all of the clutter of the thermocouple, wires, propane hose etc.
It took a little while to figure out I had to close off the large opening in the forge to get the HF torch to burn properly and achieve consistent temp but once I did that it didn't take long for me to get a constant temp of 1486-1490 degrees F and I held it there for a good 15 minutes without more than a few degrees of variation. Once I started getting close to temp I just turned down the torch almost as low as it could go and with that small flame it held the temp steady with a couple very minor manual adjustments. I don't think i could maintain a temp much lower than 1450F with this new setup but luckily that's just about as low as I need to go for now and I think between this burner and the Atlas I should be able to achieve constant temps from 1450 up to probably 2300 or so.
Once again thanks for all of the help with this.
-Aaron
The good news is that I was able to accomplish the task of achieving constant, lower temps in my forge tonight and now I'm set up much better than before to get more consistent heat treat results. At least I think I am.
The solution was a lot easier and cheaper than I thought... a $24 torch from HF. The Atlas burner is great for what it is designed to do and that is achieve forging temps in a small forge. I decided rather than trying to make it do something it wasn't designed to do, or building a new forge or buying a much more expensive venturi burner with a larger turndown ratio I'd just try a low output torch for HT and then still have the Atlas burner for achieving higher temps.
There were a few things I had to do to make it work: switch the burner, make the front of the forge the new back and the old back the new front, cover the old front port with a home made firebrick/thermocouple holder leaving just a very small opening on that port. Now I feed the blade into the muffle pipe through the old smaller back port. The thermocouple in the ceramic sheath sits inside the muffle pipe but enters in from the new back of the forge. This is actually much better anyway because it gets me away from all of the clutter of the thermocouple, wires, propane hose etc.
It took a little while to figure out I had to close off the large opening in the forge to get the HF torch to burn properly and achieve consistent temp but once I did that it didn't take long for me to get a constant temp of 1486-1490 degrees F and I held it there for a good 15 minutes without more than a few degrees of variation. Once I started getting close to temp I just turned down the torch almost as low as it could go and with that small flame it held the temp steady with a couple very minor manual adjustments. I don't think i could maintain a temp much lower than 1450F with this new setup but luckily that's just about as low as I need to go for now and I think between this burner and the Atlas I should be able to achieve constant temps from 1450 up to probably 2300 or so.
Once again thanks for all of the help with this.
-Aaron