Other uses for the Porter 1/2" burner?

J

jkf96a

Well-Known Member
If you ever think about building a forge, get the Michael Porter book about burner building. It's available on Amazon. I just got the book about a month ago, read parts of it half a dozen times, and then built the 3/4" burner. Fired it up this weekend, seemed to work well in my limited experience.

Last night I bought the fittings to build the 1/2" burner that Porter recommends for brazing. I've never brazed before, but have read a little. Anybody have experience brazing with a burner like this? What can you tell me about it?

What have you brazed in your knife shop? I'm thinking at least of threaded ends for stick tangs, and some external parts on my forge body. What else?

What else could you use the burner for? Definitely drawing back the spines of knives, I'd assume. What else?
 
Big boy soldering.
Nothing in the knife shop but I did my share of replacing rusted out floor pans on cars in the 70's. The secret to brazing was to spread the heat out over a larger area than what you were brazing. If you concentrated the heat, you'd ripple the sheet metal. Totally unrelated to knives...sorry. I use my MIG for just about everything now.

Rudy
 
Jason,
Have you ever looked up," low temp soldering" or "low temp brazing"? I stumbled onto a website once. I don't recall if I saved it but from what I recall the demo they showed on-line was like it was a paste that was heated with a bic lighter, once it was done, and cooled for a few minutes they could not pull it a part! They even claimed that it had 40,000 pounds tensile strength, I'll check as soon as I can, to see if I can find the info, I found before, I had every intention on getting some but completely forgot about it, until you posted this thread! So, thanks for jogging my damaged memory! I can see where something like this could have huge applications in knife making, I want to say it dried silver, but I'm not sure about that. Just think you've worked so hard to get your guard so perfect or it's your last piece of guard material that you have on hand,you do have more on the way, but if you jack up this piece you'll have to wait to finish it, with this stuff, I think it's possible to make the entire guard joint out of it, then grind it smooth! Essentially making it look like it's an Integral, how cool would that be!?!?
I think it's in one of Goddards books where I saw someone do that, the guy basically welded his guards on, he didn't worry about tight fitting joints because he used thin pieces of the same material he made his guards out of and basically welded them to his guard and blade. He wasn't using very high temp materials, and I want to say that he HT'd it as one single piece, check that though, my memory isn't very good, I tend to mix things up,with other things sometimes, I can't even recall which book it was, I had it out Friday, seems like my memory is getting WORSE! Anyway, hope this helps, I'll try to look it up before I go to bed, it's 1 am here, so I better get going!
Rex

Jason, lookup muggyweld.com, it looks too good to be true! But if it is and I figure out the correct one to get, it should be pretty awesome, Oh, I'm pretty sure I got the paste part wrong, that was another product, I think....believe me having memory issues are THE MOST FRUSTRATING, EVERYDAY OCCURENCE THAT YOU COULD EVER IMAINE! Trust me when I say its probably worse than just about everything else that's wrong with me!!!! Hope this helps,
Rex
 
Last edited:
That may be it, I won't know until I go back through ALL of my books again, from time to time I'm forced to step,away from making knives, due to way too many really good reasons that when I get so sick of not going to the shop I start calling them excuses, ..., well, I do until I'm back in the shop for about a half hour, then I'm mopping my way back to the house!

But once I'm better for a while, I eventually make my way back out there and if I'm very careful, I can make it last sometimes upwards of a month sometimes more, I never know exactley how long I might make it, but sooner or later I'm forced back to the house. That's when I start going through all of my books watching every video I can get my grubby paws on, looking for some sort of something that may inspire me, or possibly spark me, get the creative juices flowing, and I don't mean the type of creative juices that make you try to make something beautiful, I mean the creative juices that make you NEED to create something, ANYTHING!
I' m not positive if that was it, just like I'm not positive what was it, not until I look it up and see it, but if you say that is, I'd say, probably!
Thanks! Rex
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top