Yeah, the mattress Police raided my apartment one time. Tags were gone, I had to buy beers. Horrible event. Just say'n.
I was an assistant scoutmaster in the boyscouts years ago, and we went through a lot of those green coleman propane bottles. I got the bright idea that I was going to start refilling them, but luckily another assistant scout master told me about someone he knew who was doing that and blew his arm off. I never verified the story, but needless to say I did not refill any Coleman canisters either. I do a lot of risky things, but playing around with refilling propane bottles is not one of them. But if I did refill them, I would do it out in the middle of an empty field, so at least they would not have to clean me off the garage wall. I did have a schoolmate blow his right hand off playing around with explosive powder, and after looking at his garage right after it happened, I was cured of anything that went boom. .
Yeah that fails the Obituary Test pretty hard. (If your obituary says you died doing this thing, are knowledgeable folks reading it going to say, “Oh, well: this hobby has risks, and he died doing what he loved,” or are they going to say, “Let’s nominate this moron for the Darwin Award!”? (I learned this term lurking on an amateur rocketry mailing list. Dunno if that’s where it originates.)
Reminds me of the chemist Pierre Louis Dulong who make a career of synthesizing unstable touch explosives like nitrogen triiodide and nitrogen trichloride which blew off three of his fingers and one eye. He kept his injuries secret so that when Sir Humphrey Davy tried to replicate the experiment it promptly blew up and temporarily blinded him. Davy hired a young assistant named Michael Faraday to help out in the lab as a result.
First impressions... Its pretty much a piece of shit. It does work pretty good on propane because of the higher pressure. Right up until I blew the hose off the neck of my torch. After changing my shorts, I made the switch back over to natural gas. It clearly has the wrong orifice, but I think it may just work in my case. Flame thrower it's not, but for heating wax tools cheap and safe, maybe. Buy it again? probably not. It was full of swarf and like everything Chinese, you get an intimate look at its workings and design faults before you can actually make it work half assed.
Drilled the larger burner out with a #60 and it seems to be doing better on NG. who knows. Much improved.. It is stable burning like this.
Hmm interesting. Maybe you can get a plumbers torch and cut the tip off, then weld it onto the burner instead? I find the focused flame is better from the plumber's torch tip rather than the slow & lazy candle like flame for heating tools.
That sounds like a lot of work. If ya gotta go that far, ya might as well build it from the ground up. The first photo I posted was before drilling. I had to have the gas cranked all the way and I was lucky to get that shot of it looking so good. For the chump change I have in it, I decided to drill it. The second photo is stable on ng. I have it adjusted with a whisp of yellow at the tip and the gas is hardly cracked open... This way I can see the stupid thing is lit. You adjust the O2 by sliding the hookie joe collars at the bottom of the burners. Now the little burner can be used on it's own, or you open the second valve and get the big burner. Ya cant see the second valve in the photo, its on the back side behind the larger burner. I'm only using it to heat tools, so it works okay in this setup. I ran it for a few hours today and it probably cost me all of about 6cents to do so. Goodbye propane! When I installed gas lanterns on the front of our house, our bill went up by 7bucks for the entire month. That's 2 lanterns burning 24/7, Cheap as chips!
I bought a commercial version of a loop top burner a while back. It had two tiny holes for the flames, drilled slightly away from the loop plane, one to each face. Maybe simply an artifact of the manufacture, but it let the flames draft onto the loop at starting, and as pressure built aimed a near miss each side of the loop. Could act as a bit of self regulation. It seemed to develop flakiness, gunk in the alcohol crudding the wicking is my guess. I suggest shuffling your wicking around endwise occasionally before the heat degrades the fiber strength. Another option are the inductive units, about $50 on eBay. Often listed as infrared, they aren't. Search induction wax carver. Poke a steel tool into the opening, the thing switches on, heats the tool, switches of when withdrawn. Acts as a close approximation of a lamp flame, but zero fire hazard. I looked into them for work; they're twitchy obout open flames there, and things are too chaotic for me to flout the rules safely.
