Thread: Gas forge for heat treating?

I’ll use that sort of design for the smaller forge, this one is specifically for heat treating.

Did you mold the refractory into a flare or nozzle where the burner enters the forge? The flare or nozzle slows the gasses coming out of the mixing tube and stabilizes the flame so that the combustion stays at the burner.

No, I haven’t. I wanted to make sure it all would work before I wasted material on something that didn’t. I was also thinking that the back pressure from the forge itself would be enough.

Those frosty burners work well, you could hose clamp a quick and dirty sheet metal cone just to test your burner.

Most all of my burners are crap without a cone of some sort..

I’ll play with the other burner and see what kind of settings I get, hopefully gets me close enough for the one I welded into the ht Oven. Live and learn.

Originally Posted by jfk742

The mig tip isn’t entering the tube at the center off about an 1/8”, definitely not helping things but not sure if that’s the only reason,

This could well be a big part of the problem. I'd say, cut the burner off of the shell and see if you can get it working outside of the forge with a nozzle. At most you will be out a pipe nipple. Also Frosty claims that you really want a reducing tee and not a straight tee and reducing bushing. I've never played with that design so........

I’m stumped, built both burners at the same time, same specs same material. I even swapped the T’s to make sure it didn’t have anything to do with the one that has a slightly off center hole for the pilot.

This seems to burn fine in open air:


I did the refractory in the forge and formed a 1in12 tapered flare as best I could to see if I could get the flame burning at the tip of the burner instead of the mouth of the forge, if anything I made it worse. With playing with all the adjustments I can’t even get it to burn correctly even at low pressure with the intake near completely choked.

I’m about to just hack it off and start again, only thing stopping me is that the other burner while using the same T and pilot setup burns pretty darn well in open air even without a flare, but maybe that’s the problem...

Man.....It seems there is not enough air coming into the area where the burner is????

When you welded the burner to the shell did you stick it through the shell and weld back further on the tube? Or did you weld the end flat to the shell? Did the welding misshape the end of the burner? Did slag enter the tube and distort the airflow.

Without being there I am again just thinking out loud of why the one "welded to the shell" would perform differently.

Another thought....

Your muffle is taking up a large percentage of your front opening.

Is you opening being restricted enough to create a back pressure on your burner?

Either shorten your muffle or make your front opening bigger.