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Old 2013-04-23, 7:31am
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kbinkster kbinkster is offline
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Join Date: Jun 24, 2005
Location: Spatula City
Posts: 4,196
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Congratulations!

You can indeed work a Lynx on a single concentrator, it just isn't using the torch's full potential and will be a lot slower than if you had two small machines or a single large one. That might work out to your advantage right now while transitioning from a Hot Head. I went from a Hot Head to a Lynx and it didn't take very long to get familiar with it. I borrowed the instructional video from someone and watched it a few times, and that helped. It is posted on YouTube, so you can also watch it on-line.

Just because a torch is capable of producing a lot of heat doesn't mean you have to run it that way. You can run a soft, cool flame on the Lynx. Here's my suggestion:
Light your propane and get a yellow flame about 4"-6" long.
Turn on the green oxygen valve and adjust your flame (using propane and oxygen valves) to get a flame that has candles (the little blue jets) that are between 1/4" and 3/8" or so long. If those candles are at 1/4" (which is about as long as a typical rod of Effetre is wide) or shorter, you want to make sure that they are all blue and that there are no white/yellow tips on the ends.
Crack open the blue valve just a little bit. The more you open the blue valve, the sharper the flame will be and you don't want that just yet. For now, keep it just cracked open and work with a fluffy, cooler flame.
The sweet spot in the flame is going to be somewhere around 3-4" from the face of the torch (+/- a bit, depends on how long your candles are). Work a bit further out than that where it is cooler to start and as you get more comfortable with the heat, slowly move in closer to the sweet spot.

I would suggest playing with the torch valves to see what kind of flames you can dial in before putting glass in from of it.
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Kimberly
working glass since 1990 - melting it on a torch since 2002
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