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no. 100 or 200 heating tip for torch?

metalmagpie

Titanium
Joined
May 22, 2006
Location
Seattle
I'm reading a great book called "Flame Straightening Technology" by John P. Stewart. I got it on interlibrary loan, not wanting to remortgage my house to buy one. This guy is a genius about using heat to straighten metal or weldments, and the book is worth its weight in gold.

In it, he talks about heating 4-5" wide stripes on 5" plate to cherry red like it is no big deal. He does say you have to manifold several acetylene cylinders together to be able to flow enough gas to provide that enormous heat. He also said to use a no. 200 or a no. 100 heating tip.

It's the heating tip nomenclature that got me. I used to use enormous rosebuds in the shipyards to shrink deck plate, but I never knew anything about them - we just went and got them out of the toolroom. Since I left the shipyards in the '70s I have never seen a hint of another torch this size. Is there somewhere you can buy these? I sure don't see them in Victor's product line!

metalmagpie
 
About the book

I can't help with your question, but given your praise of the book, I did a little searching and found the following information that may be of interest to others who have not seen this book:

Description and table of contents from openlibrary.org

Other books on metal straightening from worldcat.org

Looks like the author's storefront on amazon.com has the best :eek: price: www.amazon.com

--Larry
 
One of the replies here :- Structural engineering other technical topics - Heat Straightening of steel beams says that "Heating shall be performed using large approximately 1” diameter multi-orifice heating torches operating on Propane. Other torches / fuels may be used with prior approval." which may help. Several references to other writings on this topic, most seem to be regulatory based and aimed at setting safe limits on this sort of work. Personally I'd need to be pretty sure that the steel concerned was crack tolerant.

I have heard 100, 200, 500 et al used as torch identifiers as short hand for the number of thousands of Btu output i.e. no 200 would be 200,000 Btu. Given the 1" diameter multi orifice reference above and the temperature / sizes involved this isn't completely implausible assuming John Stewart is talking about one orifice for smaller work whilst the other appears to be about bridges, ships and such-like.

Clive
 








 
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