You’ve already met Barry, the giant tank filled with mystery flammable gas. We filled him with water, drained him, tried to light fires near his miscellaneous holes, Googled how to safely cut into a propane tank about a three dozen times, and finally decided it was time for the angle grinder. Here’s the brave one who stood over the tank to make the first incision, while the rest of us squatted 15 feet away and I took pictures.
Everything went fine and we had definitely successfully emptied the tank of all of the flammable gas. We really were quite thorough. Barry’s a beast though, and it took a long time to cut through his tough hide. So, we took a break from the white knuckled cutting and started working on the homemade propane torch instead the next day.
Working roughly from this tutorial but with a few minor sizing changes, we laid out the torch pieces. We bought everything at Home Depot except for the propane regulator on Amazon.com, a 0-30 PSI regulator.
The end of the torch (the piece in the top right corner on the layout picture) needed to be flared in order to increase the heat output of the finished torch, so we heated it up and started hitting various things down into the pipe: other hammers, taps, part of an anvil, etc. It took a bit because this little furnace is pretty weak, but eventually we got it to where it needed to be.
Here’s the finished torch hooked to our propane tank via the regulator. Yes, it’s sitting on a rusty old table saw that would probably fit better in a horror movie than in a shop, but hey – it’s our only metal table right now, so we use what we have! All that was left was to use clamps to secure the torch onto the table so that it wouldn’t move once we lit it.
And here’s the torch, burning away! The flame wasn’t quite as focused and hot as we were hoping, and it turns out that it was because we’d drilled the hole in the brass tube too big. The next day, we picked up another brass tube and drilled a much much smaller hole (so small we had to use a dremel instead of a drill), and the flame was looking great! It’s ready to go into our furnace once we get Barry the tank cut up and lined with refractory.
Venus and Vulcan Forge 