Hello Keith, I'm glad I piped up there, one health scare in a month is enough for anybody eh? :-)
I think there isn't really a sound plan here unless you intend to cut it under water, scuba gear & all. My acetylene bottle is 140cm tall x 24cm diam = 64l in volume (approx) Say 2/3 of the bottle is wadding & the rest acetone - that gives around 21l of acetone. But not just acetone. It may seem empty but it will still have some acetylene in solution. Yep you could drill it carefully & safely but you want an open ended tube out of it, that means cutting it with an angle grinder.......lots of hot sparks!! Acetone has a flash point (closed cup) of -18 deg C / 0 deg F (According to Merck Index) My advice would be take it back to your engineer friend & see if he has an empty Argoshield bottle (for mig welding) this would have no wadding inside & the gas inside is a pretty inert mix of Argon, Co2 & a touch of O2. Failing that & I know you are in a remote location, but you could splash out on some steel tube from a steel stockholder, after all the East is where it's all made these days & it should be cheap. Sorry to put a dampener on the weekend project Keith - but I would really advise against chopping up that acetylene bottle. Best regards Malcolm -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Keith Addison Sent: 07 April 2005 21:00 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [Biofuel] 2 - Mother Earth News burners and glycerine by-product Hi Malcolm Damn, now I won't get that Darwin award I was hoping for... :-) Thanks very much! A timely warning, I was planning to do it at the weekend. (Phew!) I asked the engineer who gave it to me and he wasn't very concerned. He knew I wanted to cut it up and gave it to me for that purpose. The bottle is outside, it's allegedly empty, and what I was planning to do was to drill a very small hole, very carefully and slowly, into the top, prepared all the while to drop the drill and run like hell. I've done that before, but admittedly not with an acetylene tank. You don't think that's a sound plan then? The trouble is it's really hard to lay your hands on empty tanks here. There should be loads of empty gas tanks around that have passed their use-by date but we haven't got anywhere trying to locate a source for them. >Point of safety > > >I'll build another burner unit like the adapted Mother Earth burner >described in the previous post, with a forced-air supply like the first one, >but much smaller. I've got an empty acetylene >tank > > >(oxy-acetylene) about 9" diameter, and I'll use that, cut down, > >I wouldn't recommend cutting up an acetylene bottle!! > >Acetylene cannot be compressed safely to any useful degree on its own - in >fact the first attempt to compress it actually killed those working on the >project!!! BANG!!!! > >To get the acetylene to compress it is dissolved in acetone. The bottle >actually contains felt wadding soaked in acetone that's why acetylene >bottles, when you tap them, don't ring like oxygen bottles. > >PLEASE LEAVE ACETYLENE BOTTLES ALONE > >Safety first!! Indeed! Thanks again Malcolm Keith >Malcolm _______________________________________________ Biofuel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://wwia.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Biofuel archives at Infoarchive.net (searchable): http://infoarchive.net/sgroup/biofuel/
