I had to take apart a flimsy old cast iron camp stove today. Fifty year old steel screws/nuts holding the cast iron top onto flimsy sheet metal. I tried half-heartedly to unscrew them, but I knew they wouldn't budge. I would have dug out the air chisel but I wanted to save the cast iron top to use to hold up my lead pot over a Mike Porter burner. So I dug out the O/A torch and flushed off the 12 offending screws in a jiffy. Knocked off a little slag and the top is ready for the bead blaster.
Also known as the "blue tip wrench" as in contrast to the "blue point" wrench Or the "Blue tip chisel", or even the "blue tip drill and tap" when used to burn boken tuds out of cast manifolds, leaving the threads intact.
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I spent some time with mine today also, cut up the 1000 gal oil tank I just pulled out of the ground. I suppose the sawzall would of worked but the O/A is much more satisfying.
Alternative or shop names for Oxy-Acetylene torches summarised (so far):
[insert wavy lines, wavy lines in flashback] When I worked for Elcom (1984/85) as a summer job whilst at University, we repaired underground miners and mine equipment. These mining machines worked underground for months in a coal mine and in contact with corrosive acid water. Periodically they were partially disassembled and hauled out of the mine for major repairs and overhauls. Then the real fun began.
Quarter-inch high-tensile steel plate used as covers had to be bent back to shape: they were set up in a press and everyone cleared the shop while the press was controlled remotely since there was a huge amount of energy stored in those plates and you didn't want to be nearby if the plate slipped while it was been bent back to shape.
One day one of the boilermakers was trying to extract a bolt (about 1" diameter) that had previously been replaced at some time in the past. He was lying on top of the miner, head and shoulders down at in a tight squeeze at the front of the miner, trying to undo this bolt (which would have allowed the mining heads to come off, which then would have given free access to the front). Eventually, frustrated at the lack of space, he called for the "Blue Flame Spanner" to cut the head off the bolt. After ten or fifteen minutes, lots of cursing and disparaging comments were being made from the boilermaker. I asked him what the problem was, and he said, "Some F**king C**t made the bolt out of stainless steel", and he was unable to cut it off. It appeared that someone in the past had replaced the old bolt by one fabricated from stainless steel, obviously to avoid it being corroded to uselessness while underground. The only problem is that they didn't consider what they would do if they had to remove it and the problem was damage to the threads instead of being corroded in place.
Bill Lee
Note: Replace the & symbol above with an @ (done to make it harder for spammers to grab the addresses).
I've never heard it called that by anoyone who didn't use it exactly like one.
I watched a guy once making a memorial plaque in thick copper, using an oxy-acetylene torch with a sideways sheet cutting nozzle to carve lettters into it. Beautiful piece of work - he could hold the depth to within 1/8"
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