Yesterday I made a bellows visor for a sallet, fit it to the helm, and did the whole thing in about three hours. I figure it would have taken me days to do it cold, and would have required that I piece it together with welds. This is one piece of steel and took no time at all. Once I get my gas-saver rig, It'll be hard to separate me from my torch! Speaking of which, I'm probably going to get my gas-saver from Enco. It's $50 less expensive than anybody else's, and comes with a guarantee, so hopefully it works.

Have you or anybody else here, heard of or worked with Propylene as fuel source? The outside sales guy at my welding supply was chatting me up about it, and I'm very interested in it. It comes in a regular looking fuel bottle and uses the same regulators and hoses as acetylene, but the bottle holds five times as much fuel because it can be held at much higher pressures and doesn't need to be stabilized with other material in the bottle. It burns within 500 BTU's of acetylene so it's fine for heating, and the extra pressure causes it to heat very fast. It cannot be used for welding due to lack of the proper chemical makeup, but otherwise is terribly useful. It does require different tips for your torch body, but they're not too expensive. I figured that I could trade in my extra acetylene bottle and get a smaller propylene bottle (which would actually last a lot longer) and the tips and actually get money back on the deal. Because I'd be using much less acetylene, I could even downgrade my other fuel bottle to a smaller size and use that money somewhere else. An extra oxygen bottle, for instance. Normally, I ignore salesmen, but there was another customer in the store at the time who was paid, er - I mean - volunteered that he had switched his shop over to propylene and loved it. He had been using five bottles of acetylene a month, and was now using one bottle of propylene to do the same amount of work. BTW, fill-ups cost the same - about $45 for an "S" bottle up here.

Glad to see that you're still posting somewhere, Jeff. I missed your input on the Archive.

-Wombat

Don't expect a quick response from Jeff - he is on vacation for the first time in a couple of years. He will be back the beginning of December.

I haven't heard of Propylene. I know it's possible to use propane and oxy for cutting, but this propylene is a new one on me.

I suppose the advantage of it should be weighed against how much welding you do, since you must change tips, etc. It should be possible to rig hose splitters and valves to change over, but you'd have to have a separate set of regulators if you didn't want to spend all your time switching them between tanks when you want to weld or heat.

Overall, it sounds like a good economic alternative to acetylene, if the extra gear will be offset by the savings in gas cost. I don't believe my small town welding supply has propylene, but I have not checked. Perhaps I should. I can usually find used regulators and other welding supplies at swap meets.

As far as hot work in general goes, I'm still very enamored of it. The speed with which complex shapes can be formed is breathtaking sometimes. With the gas-saver rig, I'll be able to work even faster since I won't have to manually turn the torch off while hammering and manually light it again to keep heating.

Thanks for the information! Any more knowledge you've got on the subject is more than welcome - especially any insider tips on how to save $ :)

My friend Chris visited me last week, and we got to talking about propane/oxygen - and before you knew it we were hooking up the propane bottle to the fuel side of my Victor 100C and lighting it up.

Amazing! It works brilliantly, with no special modifications for both heating and cutting (up to 1/4" plate). It's maybe a 10th of second slower than acetylene in heating up 16ga steel - I can live with that. The savings in fuel cost are incredible. Once I get my gas-saver I'll be very seriously ready to "cook with gas". So...

My question (that my welding supplier can't answer): Am I damaging my torch body doing this? I can't imagine how I might be doing so, but then again, there's a lot of upleasant things I can't imagine that come to pass. I'm planning on calling/writing Victor, and there's a local welding repair guy who knows most everything worth knowing who I need to talk to anyway - but I thought I'd post here and see if anyone (Alasdair for instance) might know.

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You can use the same torch body and heating tips for propane/propylene/acetylene. You shouldn't however, use the same cutting tips. Their are specific cutting tips manufactured by Victor and Smith for cutting with propylene and for propane. Using acetylene type tips for propane cutting can lead to all sorts of problems (not to mention an internal combustion).
If your local welding supplier cannot find/supply these tips, email me and I can get them locally.

Yes, you can save a great deal of money using propane. It's cheaper than propylene (and easier to obtain). The only thing is you can't weld with propane like you can with acetelyne (the propane doesn't burn as hot). But, for just torch/heating work, propane is definitely a way to go.

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