Those of you who've followed my antics repairing a worn jet in an old Primus 100 lipstick burner ... Primus repair ... then something similar in an Atlas (Egyptian stove) coil burner ... Atlas repair ... will have noticed the progression from the use of a 0.23mm jet nipple for the 'insert' in the Primus burner, then my use of an offcut of brass sheet drilled with a 0.3mm hole (smallest micro drill I had). Drilling that 0.3mm hole was difficult. It took two drills to get the job done, the first broke off and remained in the partially-drilled hole, the second just made it without the drill breaking. The micro drills I used were from a cheap unbranded set, so I wasn't expecting miracles, but when I came to look up the availability and cost of a decent quality of drill - 1mm shank reducing to 0.22mm in cobalt steel - I recoiled at the price of around 9 GB Pounds, when I reasoned that I'd need one plus a couple of spares. So, I hit on the idea of exploiting a feature of the brass sheet I was using, a 1.5mm thick remnant of a mantlepiece clock, bought cheaply with a bundle of discarded clock bits off ebay. The various wheel shafts for the clock have small holes as pivots, typically around 0.5mm to 1mm in diameter. Here's the clock plate and you can see it's full of holes The method's really simple. You'll see a couple of the holes that I've working on that I've circled in felt tip pen. The arrows I've drawn on the sheet point to suitable holes for the 'treatment', which is to hammer the surround of the hole with a ball-pein hammer, using a steel stake mounted in a vice as the solid surface to hammer against. It's a variation of the method Bryan Miller devised (it's in the Master Fettler's section on CCS) but conferring the benefit of producing a series of usable holes for jet inserts rather than just repairing a lipstick burner jet 'in situ'. Close-up of the holes I'd been working on Getting the diameter down to the desired jet hole size is quick and reliable, provided the hole is 'tested' every so often with a pricker of the correct size Here, I've begun to cut the jet inserts out of the sheet ... ... and am just about to begin machining them to size, using a Dremel cut-off wheel I've a Monitor Tourist with a lipstick burner needing repair, so next chance I get I'll take one of those 'holes' and insert it in the burner vapouriser tube. TO BE CONTINUED John
John, that's lovely, do yuo think those holes stay cylindrical after peening? Or doesn't it matter. I have tried Bryan's peennig method, with varying success , but I do wonder just how perfect the hole needs to be.
Very clever. What size do you figure the holes are before you start peening? And, might those be something easier to drill in the first place so you would not be dependent on finding another clock piece.
The key factor I believe is the term malleability, which is a metal's capacity to be deformed under compression or hammering. A lipstick burner (the tube, the threaded portion is usually brass) is steel and not as malleable as the brass I've been using. It's thinner too and the combination makes the re-sizing of the hole in the brass sheet a much more predictable process than it is with a vapourising tube. Additionally, the extra control over the re-sizing of the hole that's available with the brass sheet on turning the piece over for a session hammering the other side is of course just not possible when peening the vapourising tube jet orifice. It helps too that the hole being re-sized is regular and not irregular (worn) as the jet orifice in the vapourising tube necessarily is to require working on. In fact, as my close-up shots of the Primus 100 vapouriser and Atlas coil burner jet orifices before the repairs showed, the orifices had suffered from erosion around the outlet rim, so wouldn't begin as 'regular' holes to be re-sized down. Well the ones I've been making use of in that brass offcut were around half-a-millimetre in diameter, and yes, it had occurred to me that drilling holes of that size in any suitable brass sheet would be a cinch. I was simply making use of the brass I had and the feature of the ready-made holes in it. John
Hi John OOOOOOOOHHHH !!! AAAAAAHHH !!! you are a clever bugger , & i thought you drilled your own hole's . Can you buy second hand hole's on ebay cos iv'e never seen any Well done for such a novel idea John, with all this lateral thinking can you levitate horizontally as well Best regards as always Stu
Just the one hole, Stu, just the one - and the effort certainly made me want to lie down for a while, but levitate no. John
The whole topic of that Monitor vapouriser tube jet replacement is here ... Monitor lipstic burner tube jet replacement ... but here's a photo sequence from that topic to finish off this thread John
I've thought of a refinement for the method if you've a drill bit of 0.22mm available. 0.22mm is the nearest standard size drill bit to 0.23mm there is, otherwise it's 0.2mm or 0.25mm. With a bit of the right size, it would be preferable to peen the smallest sized hole easily drillable (say 0.5mm) to an undersize of the 0.22mm drill bit without closing up the hole entirely. The residual hole is then drilled through with the 0.22mm drill bit. This makes the drilling of a 0.22mm hole more achievable without a breakage, using it to open out a marginally smaller pilot hole. A refinement, as I say, but not essential when the basic 'method' evidently works so well. John
John, awesome......... have been trying to find silent burner jets with 0.23 openings and all replies are "unavailable"; has anyone given thought to explore this type of solution to those of us with "high millage" stoves with beat up jets; reviewed George's quick fix by crimping down but was thinking about a more permanent fix such as shown here; cheers Lou
Two-edged sword with CCS. There's a lot of stuff on here (great) but it tends to get difficult to find with time (not so great). I make stuff I've found I'm likely to be interested a 'Favourite Topic'. Trouble is, that file's pretty sizeable these days! I use the method you've spotted, Lou, for reviving lipstick burners as a matter of course these days and since like you I've no reliable source for 0.23mm jets anymore will occasionally resort to this technique of making 0.23mm jets out of worn 0.32mm ones. I'll grant it's a bit fiddly ... John
