Soldering and Brazing Handbook for Home Machinists by Cain Tubal;

Author:Cain, Tubal;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fox Chapel Publishing

Fig. 44 This small home-made tube furnace is normally used for heat treatment, but with a small burner makes an excellent soldering iron heating stove.

Fig. 45 The ‘Soudogaz’ blowlamp, with soldering bit attachment.

Fig. 46 The author’s ancient spirit lamp.

Soldering Lamps and Torches The classical mouth blowpipe is used with a spirit lamp, and I don’t propose to go further into it than that. If you can use one you need no words from me, and if you can’t (or haven’t), no words of mine can show you how; you must learn the hard way – blow it and see! I will add only that in skilled hands it is a very precise tool indeed. However, the spirit lamp by itself has its uses for providing gentle heat when tinning, or for delicate work. The flame is very clean and deceptively hot – quite large pieces can be brought up to soldering temperature. My own, Fig. 46, is very old but similar ones are still sold by horological tool suppliers. Naturally, any spirit lamp will do (though I suggest a wick no more than ¼-inch diameter) and they are easy to make, but I like the glass ones as I can see how much spirit is left. The glass cap prevents too much loss by evaporation when not in use, but it is best to empty them when not likely to be used for some time.

Any of the smaller brazing torches can, of course, be used for applying general heat to a large component before soldering on a smaller part. Use a ‘soft’ flame. For pukka blowpipe soldering, however, you need something rather more delicate. Fig. 47 shows one such, by ‘Flamefast’. It can be used as shown in Fig. 37 as a fixed flame with the burner set in one of two attitudes on the base (as shown, or dead vertical) or as a hand-held burner. It will run from any butane regulator supplying gas at 11 inches watergauge pressure (28 millibar) and needs but a small amount of low-pressure air. However, it is normally supplied with a tiny blower – actually one designed for supplying air to fishbowls – and an adapter to draw gas from the Taymar or similar disposable butane cans. It is a very handy burner indeed, as having control over both air and gas any type of flame can be produced, from a gentle ‘warmer’ to one of pinpoint intensity. It is just the thing for work which demands two hands to hold it.

‘Third Hands’ Many complex fabrications need jigs to hold the parts together while soldering, and I must confess that I find it a little odd that modelers who will quite happily spend hours, if not days, making up a jig for some machining operation disdain to do so for the equally important metal joining operations. Almost all industrial soldering, automatic or manual, is done using jigs and there is no reason why we should not do so as well. However, there are

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