|
Hi Skinner, Your tip is dirty and/or too much heat is being used. If a clean tip as described below, then adjust your heat down as it doesn't take alot of heat to cut light gauge metal and this also keeps the metal from warping. The cleanest cut comes from a clean tip. After you clean all the orifice bores in the tip, fire up the torch and set flame for cutting, then depress the cutting lever and observe the inner cutting cone flame. There should be a long very "uniform" inner flame cutting cone. If that inner cone is not "very" uniform then your cut will be ragged just like the flame cone is and the back of the metal will have slag. Reclean the center orifice until it's very uniform. A cut with a clean tip will have a very smooth cut surface with very little (if any) slag on the backside of the cut. If either one of these is not present reclean the tip. The center bore orifice can get deformed and the tip needs replaced or cut off. It's really important to hold the cleaning file straight in the bore hole and just removing enough material to clean the bore to make the tip last a long time. I've never used a new tip that was clean enough for cutting right out of the box. To expand on my thoughts: Altough theres many different tip sizes, I have a found a No-3 makes for a all around good cutting tip as it will cut upto 1-1/2" or 18ga sheet metal depending on the preheat setting. Another consideration is as the tip size becomes smaller so does the orifice size and it becomes a bare to clean them ity bity holes. If using an automatic cutting machine then changing tip size would be a production benefit. Setting the proper neutral preheat flame, the orifice holes around the center cutting orifice, can be observed by the tip of the inner flame cone. A neutral flame has a blue colored flame outer sheild with a light blue to white inner cone flame that is slightly rounded at the cone tip. A oxidizing flame (too much oxygen) has a sharp pointed very white inner cone. A reducing flame (not enough oxygen) would have a very round to a ragged thrid inner cone. T_Bone
| 
