How to use a Welding Torch for Wire Sculptures

Video Transcript

"I'm Mark Kooy here with Expert Village and we are going to be talking about wire sculpture and braising techniques and tools. The next thing that we will do with setting up our torch is that the head of the torch or the tip should be only hand tightened but it needs to be tight. It has a little o-ring in there that keeps it snug. You are going to feel how it works best for you. I tend to have it set about a 45 degree so that it sits in my hand like a pencil more or less. That allows me to be able to adjust my tips and have a lot of dexterity in working with the tip so then I tighten that down. Then at this point, I turn on my gas first just a little bit. Make sure that both valves are loose but closed. It makes it a little easier to strike with our striker we talked about a little earlier. What I do with the gas is just turn it on so that I can barely feel it. It is like a baby breathing on the back of your hand pretty much. Then that way when you go to strike it and it works better to kind of hold it on the table, you don't end up with a big flame flying out of there. So you notice that before I turned the oxygen on, the gas flame was blowing a lot of little black floaties and stuff, so you try to turn that off as soon as you can but it is only about 2 1/2 to 3 inches long. You don't want a big huge gas flame like shooting way out there. You don't need that especially for braising because we then turn up th oxygen and what we want to do is that we call that our neutral flame. If your little gas too much gas you get the longer flame and you get this feathery blue flame. You can see that is really really bright right down inside. What we want is just that little bright blue cone and if you go too far, it will snap and blow out. So you don't want to go too far, just so that second blue flame goes away like that and then your torch is ready to do the braising. "