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Thread: M0xxy makes a mess

  1. #41
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    Default Re: M0xxy makes a mess

    Check your local craigslist for an 80 gal air compressor, rip off the old compressor on top of the tank and THOROUGHLY clean out the inside with a solvent to remove all residual oils from the previous lubricated compressor, then attach your compressor to the tank with a check valve. Your compressor will probably fill it's container to 120 PSI, then turn off. Any commercial compressor comes with it's own holding tank. This will save you hundreds of dollars buying a higher volume tank new, just make sure to clean the used tank well.

    There has to be a few threads around here addressing these same questions. Give these forums a search, and you will find gold.
    Last edited by AxisWolf; 12-16-2020 at 10:47 AM.

  2. #42
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    Default Re: M0xxy makes a mess

    I understand. Thanks for your help so far.

    To change the subject away from compressed gasses, lets talk about sucking vacuum for a bit. I had a vacuum pump laying around for other projects already, so I plumbed it up to my system to begin some fun and games with sleeving and other tricks.


    The pump can pull a pretty hefty vacuum if ran against a closed vessel so I put together a little 'manifold' so I could control pressure to some degree. It has a bypass valve that I can open and close to modulate the final pressure. I can close the output valve, set the -PSI, open the output valve, and I'm ready to rock. I doubt I'm achieving gauge pressure on the working piece but I think it's reproducible, whatever the final vacuum is, and that's good enough for now. I've read the same effect can be had with a soda bottle? Leave it to me to overthink it Also can be seen is the rad sintered filter, I'd seen pictures of these before but it was my first excuse to order one. Seems cool, from a materials standpoint its a neat way to build a little cover so I don't pull in debris! Not sure how effective or even necessary it really is at the end of the day but I've got 4 more for other projects thanks to mr bezos. The whole thing is controlled by a simple footpedal to turn the pump on and off.

    I had been searching Mountain Glass stock randomly one day and saw some inexpensive tubing in a color I liked but was too spendy in >=25.4mm thickness to work directly with. This is the milky green tube, 25x4 is $75/4ft, whereas i noticed the 12x2 is $20/4ft. If I had to guess the larger tube is probably a better deal per lb, but I had the idea I could start experimenting with sleeving the smaller tube with clear - not only could I get the color material I wanted, I could do more experimentation for cheaper and start doing some layered work as well. I'm kind of stoked because I feel like this is the first time I'm starting to stack learned techniques to do something novel rather than following a recipe. I ordered a stick of milky green, milky pink, some cheaper cobalt and black as well and started to go to town learning to sleeve. Most of this is on what I've been thinking about as the "prep" side of my efforts, anything I make is either trash or a very simple handpipe.


    First attempt was just a quick oneoff while doing some other work. I made a mistake trying to keep the inside of the inner tube centered by forming a point and gluing it to the outer wall. I had seen that trick on a scientific video but it was crack city because I wasn't babysitting temps (?) well enough. I don't know the root cause for sure tho because in the future I switched to using a thin solid rod that self-centers in the other side's blowtube and haven't looked back to work out the technique lol. That end of the sleeving tube exploded when I got to it, but i was able to salvage enough material to build out a pipe. I had haphazardly fumed it lightly so its got some texture on the blue. It's a basic handpipe but the heft is great, and the optical depth (im finding it impossible to photograph!) makes me happy enough to call this basic shape a success.

    After that first experiment, I did a run of just sleeved prep trying to think through how to stage each step so as things are warming up in the kiln I'm prepping the next one, etc. I did a couple of fumed cobalts to warm up and then a pink and a green. I found the small tubes to be pretty shocky so the first step is to put the ends in the kiln to warm up so I'm attaching and flame cutting an already-warmed piece. If I was slower with introducing them to the flame I may be able to avoid this step but it seems to be 100% successful for now.






    I picked up a bunch of good things from this practice. One bad habit I was forming was letting my hands part while sleeving - by doing so, I'm pulling the tube out far too thin, thinner than necessary. I started consciously "pushing them together" (in reality that mostly just counters the drift apart) and it's helping me end up with thicker material reducing time & risk when I go to condense it back down. Unfortunately, I annealed these and picked up the prep a few days later to form into pipes and proceeded to monkeysmash my way through all of it w/ nothing to show. Whoops! I probably would have stopped earlier if I didn't have so much prepwork ready to go with a plan in mind but no patience to pull it off.

    Since then, I've done a few sleeving sessions.

    This is a little gold & silver on black piece. I'm still trying to get better colors but this is the first time I've gotten that deep green, which ofc looks good deep in the glass.


    I tried some GA Amazon Night on pink just because it was what I had around. In hindsight I had the flame too wide and was pulling down too fast, and ended up with airbubbles trapped behind the small dots. Interestingly enough, the bubbles seem to have fumed from the metal in the color. I had to add a bit of a lipwrap too because my blowtube pulled off some of the mouthpiece and it seemed like the quickest fix to get the piece done.


    The bowl is green with white dotted on it. It's a good combo but I folded it over while condensing, the horn (my first!) sucks, and it cracked all around laterally from the horn location a few days later. The pipes were pretty 'ok', although I need to practice my fuming a bunch still.


    The pipe on the bottom has clear dots over g&s fume. They didn't incorporate they way I wanted, just kinda looks like mold or something /sigh. Interesting shape to the pipe and it seems OK. The one of the left is a cautionary tale about not getting the clear thickness even, and the one on the right is an interesting experiment. I wish I had gotten a picture, but I very coarsely wrapped white on a cobalt tube (like a spring on a shaft, barely melted in) and then sleeved it with 32 to get more clear (and get it into the hole w/ all the white lol). I sleeved with a much thinner flame than the pink w/ AN and was able to reduce the trapped air a bunch. It's not a terribly artistic pipe but I'm happy with the experiment and the depth effect is exactly what I was going for. The pipe in the back tho...


    It turns out Momka's is kinda local and the backstory sounds neat (not knowing much about Momka Peeva personally, but oldschool Bulgarian engineers are generally cool imho) so I ordered some of their glass to play with 'cause they had a sale in November, including violet Medley. One day I made a little test bubble and liked the purple I achieved, but ran out of gas while coilpotting. I was able to get a nice picture of a cool coilpot as a result tho! I was able to pick up where I left off after getting more O2. I striped a little bit of clear onto the blank, smoothed it out, and sleeved it w/ 32mm. I'm pretty happy with everything but the purple I was able to achieve, but I may re-kiln this in an attempt to kiln strike it. In the next attempt I'm going to try and get the coilpotted section a little thinner. It's got an amazing heft and feel for the size considering it used less than a stick of color lol.




    I will definitely be doing more sleeved coilpotting experiments in the future, i liked it a lot better than striping and blowins by far.
    Last edited by m0xxyboro; 12-16-2020 at 07:05 PM.

  3. #43
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    Default Re: M0xxy makes a mess

    1) You have to measure the oxygen consumption of your own work style to know for sure, but I'd guess 30gal could support 10-20 minutes of maximum flame from a phantom. If you have a foot pedal and are toggling the outer fire you can stretch that out (a lot).

    2) Its hard to know much about this topic. Starving a compressor should lower its lifespan, but it does not seem to damage the concentrators. If you are pulling more volume from the concentrators it will lower purity, but if you adjust the concentrator's valves to their normal output it should be no different from their perspective.
    I'd note that the commercial systems support a fairly wide range of input, say 2-4 concentrators. But they are using single phase compressors without speed control, so the compressor must be starved for people running less than maximum capacity.

    3) Compressors with built in tanks often have the pressure switch attached to the tank. If you bypass the tank you will need to purchase a new pressure switch, which is what I did. Compressors without tanks often have a built in pressure switch, but you might not be able to adjust its setpoint.

    4) In the vast majority of setups the compressor will be more powerful than the concentrators. You are not going to maintain pressure on the concentrator side unless you are turning off or slowing down the compressor in some way.

    In my system I am choking the compressor which will reduce its lifespan, but I am also operating at 60psi which will increase its lifespan. When I built the system there was less information and I really had no idea if it would work. I just kind of went with the cheapest parts available and it exceeded my expectations.

    Here are the complicated parts of my system, after this its just tank->regulator->torch. https://imgur.com/SZZhUX1 https://imgur.com/KEDxsRb
    I spliced the pressure switch into an extension cord that the compressor plugs into, no electrical modifications were needed for the compressor.

  4. #44
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    Default Re: M0xxy makes a mess

    Thanks for the feedback. The hard part about #1 is I'm not really wanting to measure the consumption of my "current" work, but my "future" work and my trajectory has definitely to utilize a larger and hotter flame for longer periods over time as I take on bigger work or try and work faster. 10-20 minutes is a decent run time, especially when info from Scott@OF leads me to believe its probably a 20-40 minute fill time as well.

    I'm going to continue to ponder on this for a bit and start collecting parts and get a surge tank coming for the time being, hopefully this time next week I'll be plumbed up to only run the outer fire off of the tanks. I did some work last night and concentrated on running a hot centerfire unless I really needed a huge amount of heat (very rarely) or just a wider flame (sometimes seems to help me keep things even imho). I can probably leave my outerfire off 80-90% of the time, so we'll see how it feels with the mixed sources.

    I did another sleeving operation last night, this time trying out frit and black inner tube. The frit is Amazon Night and I think it turned out pretty good, the natural fuming is great on the inner black. One obvious takeaway is that I def need to get a filter on the vacuum line if I plan to do more frit sleeving!


    Continuing my sleeving adventure, this time with 25mm pulled down over 12mm black with some frit sandwiched inbetween. The frit color is saturated with silver. This is what I was left with post-sleeve, an uneven ball of glass.


    A few rounds of condensing and blowing got me into a mostly round ball with a mostly equal wall thickness. I took this hotshot right on the edge of finishing evening it out. Really leaned into Roadrunner11's feedback, I was really slow and deliberate with both my rotations and my blows, and I achieved even wall thicknesses painlessly compared to some of my other efforts. It helps this color combination makes it easy to tell as well.
    As far as I can tell I had been slowly increasing my spin rates to 'even out my heatbase' which just made the heating more uneven, every little hitch or slowdown made more of a hotspot than if you just go slow. I'll play with this some more on my next few efforts but felt good this time.






  5. #45
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    Default Re: M0xxy makes a mess

    I bought some components to put together a surge tank setup and a pedal (based on this thread ofc, I'll post my full build w/ variations once it's done), but one piece of plumbing for each project won't be here until mid next week, if it even makes it before xmas. Grainger!! Just kidding, I can wait and I feel for everyone who works some sort of logistics job; I'm pretty sure this is the worst time of year in the worst year.

    In the meanwhile now that I have the valves and majority of other parts I'm going to try and figure out how I am going to mount this mess under my bench. Pedal feels great to tap, much nicer than the plastic momentary outfit I have for the vacuum. It works great for that very light-duty application but I will leaving this one under the bench and be stomping on this more often so its good it feels more solid.

    I'm not /that/ excited bout burning 25W (solenoid datasheet numbers, at least, haven't dug for actual holding current values for long run times or cooling requirements) whenever my outerfire is on, but I like the idea of getting the hoses off of the floor. The "nice" RockIt mechanical(?) pedal would have the hoses all over the floor, even if the pedal would be very nice.

    https://imgur.com/gallery/qytwudk



    https://imgur.com/gallery/rPAbUAQ/
    Did some work last night, including a couple of wigwag balls. The first one on the left condensed OK but at times got pretty thin and washed the pattern out. The sections that didn't get pulled down as thin kept the pattern better, so I didn't pull the second one down quite so far. I think this is a balancing act - I need to find a happy middle ground, which is probably influenced by my ability to condense w/o distortions, which is something I need to keep working on.




    I made a few handpipes out of some encased Momka's Violet Medley.


    My first attempt at a sleeve was a terrible waste as the sleeve exploded right as I started closing the end of the tube around the coilpotted color blank. I did the only thing I could think to do which is break the remainder of the color out and reuse it.


    Marvered the end down and stuck it back on the blowtube, leaving the broken bit behind.


    First pipe is a bit dumpy shaped but is usable for sure.



    I dotted this one a bit, really only got the deep purple I want on the dots and a bit on the inner lip of the mouth hole.



    These purple dots came off literally the same color rod as the internal tan-ish color. It's crazy how varied this glass ends up depending on how its worked.

    https://imgur.com/gallery/s6ji2CW

    My first attempt at a fancy ornament. It's got a neat little honeycomb thing on front but is kinda plain around the back w/ just white.


    Made a little honeycomb(?) thing out of Momka's Violet Medley and some clear dots. The clear spots have great depth that is hard to capture with a camera.


    I glued it onto a white frit snowball.


    Rounded it back out.


    Not a perfect sphere but pretty good.


    Glued an icicle on either side.


    Looks cool from the front.


    The body cracked before I could get it back in the kiln. I'm going to try and chase the crack to save the piece, but it's probably too heavy to use as an ornament anyways. I like my walls T H I C C apparently.


    The cracking may have been from the frit (not usually a problem anymore), the icicle additions (marble adding has been a problem in the past), or stress from the small hole I blew in it for pressure relief as the crack runs between all three features. I think the true root cause tho is I just took way too long dicking around trying to get the blowtube off. I made the mistake of moving to claw grabbers too early and I think the combination of things allowed it to super cool down.

    I'm going to do some more of these later today, but replace the glass hanger on the top with a lipped hole. I have some ornament clasps that should work nicely and that will both give the vessel a nice big hole so it's not sealed and reduce the weight a little bit.
    Last edited by m0xxyboro; 12-20-2020 at 02:54 PM.

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