Carlisle Mini CC Question

[laurieeller]

Has anyone ever used an O2 tank with the mini CC? if so, did it work or did it drink it up? I'm trying to figure if i should get the tank or concentrator... what do you think?

thanks for any help, very appreciated.

[PaulaD]

A standard size tank will last 35 to 40 hours on average.

Paula

[squid]

if you can swing the upfront cost of the concentrator, that is definitely the way to go - you will save money in the long run! And actually, the run doesn't have to be very long to already be saving

[Cosmo]

For a Mini CC, I recommend two 5LPM concentrators, one higher output concentrator or tanks. On a single 5LPM machine the flame goes into reduction pretty easily. It's hard to get a good hot, neutral flame on a single 5LPM machine. Of course, tanked oxygen will be best for any torch, but with at least 10LPM of oxygen flow, the Mini CC will get a good flame.

[PaulaD]

My high pressure oxygen tank only costs $20.00 to refill...
Paula

[Cosmo]

Yeah. Ours here range from $20-25 depending on who you talk to. If I could get liquid here I'd do that. It's about $120 for a liquid fill, but it's equivalent to 40 or 50 compressed gas tanks.

[lbjvg]

Originally Posted by Cosmo

For a Mini CC, I recommend two 5LPM concentrators, one higher output concentrator or tanks. On a single 5LPM machine the flame goes into reduction pretty easily. It's hard to get a good hot, neutral flame on a single 5LPM machine. Of course, tanked oxygen will be best for any torch, but with at least 10LPM of oxygen flow, the Mini CC will get a good flame.

I agree. I started with one 5 lpm concentrator and it just wasn't adequate. I now have two and it provides plenty of O2.

[NightCat]

Originally Posted by Cosmo

Yeah. Ours here range from $20-25 depending on who you talk to. If I could get liquid here I'd do that. It's about $120 for a liquid fill, but it's equivalent to 40 or 50 compressed gas tanks.

Hey Cosmo, I don't think you are telling the whole story with the liquid O2. I have been looking into switching to liquid and it is WAY expensive. From my understanding it goes like this. $100 a month rental for the dewer (tank), $120 for refill..... the tanks continuously vent so whether you use the O2 or not the tank empties in 6-8 weeks. Switching to liquid will cost @ $160 per month... At this point I am not going through 8 tanks of compressed O2/month. Even if you own your own $3,000 dewer you still have a steady $60-$80 a month expense. I am using 3-4 tanks a month but I don't have the $3K to swing this option.

I just can't see making the switch unless you are doing flameworking full time on a large torch or sitting on a fat wad of cash.

If I've got this wrong please let me know.

~Ross~

[PaulaD]

I'm only paying $40.00 a month for the Dewar lease.

Paula

[Hothead Beads]

I run mine on 2, 5 LPM concentrators and it works great! It worked with one, but not nearly as well.

[Cosmo]

Originally Posted by NightCat

Hey Cosmo, I don't think you are telling the whole story with the liquid O2. I have been looking into switching to liquid and it is WAY expensive. From my understanding it goes like this. $100 a month rental for the dewer (tank), $120 for refill..... the tanks continuously vent so whether you use the O2 or not the tank empties in 6-8 weeks. Switching to liquid will cost @ $160 per month... At this point I am not going through 8 tanks of compressed O2/month. Even if you own your own $3,000 dewer you still have a steady $60-$80 a month expense. I am using 3-4 tanks a month but I don't have the $3K to swing this option.

I just can't see making the switch unless you are doing flameworking full time on a large torch or sitting on a fat wad of cash.

If I've got this wrong please let me know.

~Ross~

Not exactly. The tanks do vent. If you don't use the tank at all, it will be empty in 15 days or so. The reason they vent is because the liquid oxygen is converting to gas inside it, and when it builds up pressure it vents off the excess pressure. If you are using gas to burn in a torch, it lasts much longer. Obviously how long it lasts depends on the torch(es) running off of it.

We do have to lease it for $280 per year. I don't know if they even sell them at all. After that it's $110-120 per fill. Some friends of mine have one and run two torches the same size as mine off one and the tank lasts them at least a month at a time. Consider that they were going through 20-25 K tanks a month at $20 a pop, and, well, you do the math.

[LaVere]

I have a Carlisle Mini CC and two Oxycons but I only need one most of the time, I work with Effetre Glass up to 10 mm with just the one. Once in a while I play with Boro 32 COE and use two and that works just fine. I may just hook up the second Oxycon to a second torch I have and or get a new second torch. Oh yes I am using NG and not propane.

[Anne Ricketts]

What, you don't believe me?

[Amethyst_briolette]

My mini runs off a 10lpm invacare oxycon, and I only have it set to run at 6lpm. it CRANKS. I don't do boro, but if I did I bet I would have plenty of heat with this oxycon. I like it The mini is so nice and quiet!

[Cosmo]

Heat isn't the only factor when it comes to boro. Oxygen purity is just as important. With a single concentrator, you usually just don't have the purity to get the colors to come out like they should.

[tajones1463]

I've never used the tanked o2. I made the choice in the beginning to go with the oxycon. It just made sense money-wise. I run my mini cc with one 5lpm concentrator. It works great! No complaints from me.

[kbinkster]

Originally Posted by Cosmo

Heat isn't the only factor when it comes to boro. Oxygen purity is just as important. With a single concentrator, you usually just don't have the purity to get the colors to come out like they should.

Actually, if you have a single concentrator that puts out good purity, adding a second concentrator that puts out the same purity does not improve your overall purity (concentration of oxygen). It just increases the volume. Now, if your first concentrator does not put out good purity, but your second one does, then the concentration is improved a little by adding the second one.

You can run a single concentrator and still crank up the propane to get longer candles - but it will be a reduction flame. To get those long candles used for most boro and a neutral flame, you need more oxygen (volume) than a single 5 LPM concentrator provides.

Keep in mind that with boro, you can work with a more reducing flame than most soft glass. On standard torches, a neutral flame will be your hottest.

[Cosmo]

Originally Posted by kbinkster

Actually, if you have a single concentrator that puts out good purity, adding a second concentrator that puts out the same purity does not improve your overall purity (concentration of oxygen). It just increases the volume. Now, if your first concentrator does not put out good purity, but your second one does, then the concentration is improved a little by adding the second one.

You can run a single concentrator and still crank up the propane to get longer candles - but it will be a reduction flame. To get those long candles used for most boro and a neutral flame, you need more oxygen (volume) than a single 5 LPM concentrator provides.

Keep in mind that with boro, you can work with a more reducing flame than most soft glass. On standard torches, a neutral flame will be your hottest.

Yes, but running higher pressures (close to the max that a concentrator will put out) will lower the purity. When you crank up a torch to get a hotter flame, you need more pressure. To do that with one concentrator, you run it wide open. If you have two concentrators, they don't have to work as hard to put out the same pressure, so they are putting out more pure oxygen. And, no concentrator is going to be as pure as tanked oxygen anyways.

You can run a reducing flame with any glass, but in boro, it effects the color of the glass much more than in most soft glasses.

[ziggys]

Originally Posted by Amethyst_briolette

My mini runs off a 10lpm invacare oxycon, and I only have it set to run at 6lpm. it CRANKS. I don't do boro, but if I did I bet I would have plenty of heat with this oxycon. I like it The mini is so nice and quiet!

Could you tell me where you bought the Invacare 10LPM?
Thank you,
Angela

[ziggys]

Originally Posted by tajones1463

I've never used the tanked o2. I made the choice in the beginning to go with the oxycon. It just made sense money-wise. I run my mini cc with one 5lpm concentrator. It works great! No complaints from me.

Hi Tajones,
Could you please tell me which concentrator you own? From what I am learning (and I may learn differently later) if you have a good concentrator, one that actually runs at 5LPM when it is set at that, it will work great with the Mini CC.
I am about to upgrade from a Hot head to the Mini CC and the concentrator seems to be the most confusing part of all of it.
Thank you, Tajones!

I was surprised at all the different responses to what concentrator one needs to make the Mini CC run well.
FWIW, I asked a sales person at Carlisle that sells the Unlimited Oxycon by Cyrogenics about this. He said that a lot of concentrators are not accurate, and so even if it set to 5LPM it may not be producing 5.
They have been doing tests on all of them because they need to know the real output (or whatever it's called) to sell the correct one for the correct torch. Excuse my lack of technical terminology.

Edit: Yikes! Now that I think about it, maybe he said the purity level is not accurate or maybe both!

Oh, one last thing he said. To get a oxidizing flame one needs to turn down the propane, not up the Oxy. I didn't know this either though maybe you guys do but it makes sense doesn't it? I am a real newbie when it comes to surface mix torchs.
Thanks for any more input,
Angela

[LyndaJ]

When I was given advice for this torch with an oxycon, I was recommended to turn the O2 up as high as it would go, and adjust the gas (propane on natural gas) to obtain the flame characteristics that I wanted. This keeps the knobs cooler. The less gas(propane) you put in, the more O2/oxidizing the flame is.

With one concentrator I can't get a big oxidizing flame.

[kbinkster]

Angela, oxygen concentrators are equipped with flow meters, so what you see is what you get - unless the flow meters have been tampered with in some way.

Oxygen purity will decrease as flow increases. This is just as true for brand new machines as it is for reconditioned ones. As long as your purity remains above 90% at 5 LPM, you should be good to go. Of course, sometimes the wording in the specs makes it seem like you are or should be getting higher purity with a machine when they say "93% +/- 3% at 5 LPM" or something like that.

I have heard from several people that they run a Mini CC on 5 LPM and that it is fine for soft glass beadmaking. I think that if you wanted to work any larger/hotter than that, you would need more oxygen. Of course, I have seen some pretty large soft glass beads made on a Mini CC and a single 5 LPM concentrator.

[CO_Phantom]

I have a single oxycon on my miniCC and the last time I thought it was fine, but it appears to not be adequate anymore. Or I'm just more impatient. I just got my torch set up again tonight (posted about thisin the propane fluctuating thread as well) and every now and then the candles would go way long and it would become a reducing flame. Then after a bit it would go back to a neutral flame. It was very intermittant. Propane regulator didn't appear to be fluctuating.

Could it be the oxycon? How often do they switch sieve beds? I have a NewLife Airsep.

I also noticed I couldn't get the candles to be as long as I wanted them to be for the neutral flame, it seemed to take FOREVER to melt the Reichenbach I was working with, and the torch knobs got very hot.

Help! =)

-Amy

[beadsoncypress]

I run my Mini on a 5 ltr concentrator just fine (I work on 104 only). When working in a teaching studio, we used regular tanks (7 tanks of O2 for every tank of propane). The liquid is the best, but you really need to use it frequently and have high usage to make it worthwile. When I set up my own studio, I IMMEDIATELY when to the concentrator as I did not want to deal with the large tanks and the delivery issues in a residential area.

[kbinkster]

Originally Posted by CO_Phantom

I have a single oxycon on my miniCC and the last time I thought it was fine, but it appears to not be adequate anymore. Or I'm just more impatient. I just got my torch set up again tonight (posted about thisin the propane fluctuating thread as well) and every now and then the candles would go way long and it would become a reducing flame. Then after a bit it would go back to a neutral flame. It was very intermittant. Propane regulator didn't appear to be fluctuating.

Could it be the oxycon? How often do they switch sieve beds? I have a NewLife Airsep.

I also noticed I couldn't get the candles to be as long as I wanted them to be for the neutral flame, it seemed to take FOREVER to melt the Reichenbach I was working with, and the torch knobs got very hot.

Help! =)

-Amy

Yes, Amy, it could definitely be the oxycon causing the fluctuation. All the 5 LPM machines will have some fluctuation - depending on how hard you push your torch - simply because of the design and how they switch from one seive bed to another. Air is passed through one seive bed and oxygen is taken out and then put into an internal storage tank. While that is going on, the same process occurs with a second seive bed. The timing is offset so that they are not emptying into the internal storage tank at the same time. If you are running your torch on a low setting and not emptying that internal storage tank quickly, it appears to be a steady flow of oxygen. However, when you push your torch and use more oxygen, you empty that internal storage tank and are then pretty much using the oxygen as soon as it gets to the tank. At that point, you will notice a pause at the switch between one seive bed's production and the other. During that brief pause, no oxygen is being produced, so you will see a fluctuation in your flame. This is an oversimplified description of a complex process, but it explains why you get fluctuation, or "breathing."

Normal "breathing" is pretty rythmic, though. Yours does not sound like normal breathing.

It also sounds like you may have a purity problem. If you can get long neutral candles, it should not take forever to melt soft glass and the torch should not overheat as easily. A reduction flame caused by poor purity will cause the torch to overheat and it will take a long time to melt glass, too. The tricky thing is that it can look like a neutral flame because you are still passing air through the torch and air combusts fuel (just not as efficiently as oxygen) and your candles won't necessarily get the big white/yellow tips.

[CO_Phantom]

Hrm...

I never had it happen before, so it's a totally new thing to me.

The propane is brand new. Just picked up the tank the day before yesterday. Last night was my first time using this tank.

I wasn't getting very long candles out of my torch when I tried to set it at a neutral flame. I was thinking thats why the torch was getting so hot. The candles when I cranked the propane got really long--nice long reducing candles. The neutral ones were rather puny. It seems like my flame was very 'small' if that makes sense.

I will try to bump up the propane a few PSI as mentioned in another thread. It is a regulator from Arrow Springs. The numers on the left gauge go up to 15 psi at the 12 oclock position, then a "red zone" after that.

What can be done about a purity issue?

-
Amy

[LyndaJ]

Sounds like your oxycon is not producing pure enough oxygen. Not that there's something wrong with your propane.

[CO_Phantom]

I was suspecting it was the oxycon.

I got to thinking...I took my 3 whole beads out of the kiln this a.m. and the first bead I made is a nice orange spacer. The second bead I made is burnt orange spacer. The third bead I made is my first hollow ever. Also burnt. Disgusting.

Since the first one was fine, and the fluctuations were ocurring later in the torch session (from what I can remember...LOTS going on last night) do you suppose I hadn't let my oxycon run long enough to warm up before I started torching? I let it run for a while, but didn't set a timer or anything..just until I thought "okay. it's been about 20 minutes" and then started working. If my first bead was okay and they went downhill from there, do you suppose I didn't have the oxycon going long enough? Would not letting it warm up enough do something like that?

Me thinks, me thinks....(hoping it's user error and not oxycon failure. Could be either. User error cheaper to fix.)

-Amy

[Norskiglass]

I really dont know why soft glass bead maker do not use an compressed air instead of O2.....~works so much better! As for boro I have used compressed O2 for years and have moved on to liquid (cryo cyl.) as for the question of how long does it last? ~that all depends on what you make and how much you work on the torch,minors and mini cc's are very efficient and use very little O2 if you run the line pressure 7-10psi. if you work 4-5hrs a day all week long one 240 should last you......just remember that there are a variety of tank volumes available.....and the 500t saves transport time as well as cash!

~now pull out the boro and crank up the torch!!

[CO_Phantom]

Are you talking about tanked oxygen?

I'd considered that. Briefly. I travel a lot and figured moving an oxycon is a whole lot safer than moving an O2 tank. Plus unless you have a place to anchor that tank, the idea just scares the bejeepers out of me. I throw myself into enough of a tizzy about the propane tank. Didn't need the added stress of an O2 tank. Now, when I get home and set up permanently then that's what I might consider since my brother has oxy cylinders and I'd have a real workbench I can chain that bad boy down to.

For the moment, to me, the oxycon is the safer way to go. I had no problems with it before I moved and I think the problems I had with it last night are due to my having been not set up for 6 months and having no practice in that long of time.

-Amy