Hot Devil Oxy Set – Tester Adam Watkins
Every now and then a workshop needs to remove a stubborn bolt or heat something up for installation or removal and an oxy torch would come in handy however having to rent gas bottles and have them sitting in the corner unused for long periods can be expensive. When I saw the Hot Devil Oxy set advertised in a magazine I thought that this could be a practical solution. So when we were asked to tool test the Hot Devil oxy kit for the Australian Car Mechanic we jumped at the chance.
The Hot Devil Oxy set uses a mixture of oxygen and MAP gas (a mixture of methylacetylene and propadiene) producing a flame temperature of 2926 degrees Celsius. This kit comes in a sturdy metal cylinder stand and is lightweight weighing in at just over half a kilogram. The kit comes with a precision cutting nozzle, hoses and a flint lighter. There are no regulators to fiddle with and bottles are single use only.
After checking out the videos on the Hot devil website we put the Hot Devil oxy set to work in the Automotive workshop here at the Northern Beaches campus. The torch needs to be lit away from any draught and once going it was able to cut a piece of 3mm plate easily and heat up some bolts and components for removal. You do use quite a bit of gas with the running time for heating and brazing approximately 15-20 mins and during our cutting test the oxygen bottle ran dry after 5 mins of cutting and without gauges it can be hard to know just how much gas is left in the bottles. Students found the oxy kit easy and safe to use and being portable we were able to move it easily around the workshop. We found the torch small enough to get into some tight spaces. During our test we heated a crankshaft bolt for removal and found the hoses were sufficiently long enough to be practical and to keep the bottles at a safe distance away from the flame area and the flame sufficiently heated the bolt.
The Hot Devil oxy kit is a practical solution in the modern automotive workshop that only needs to use an oxy set every now and then. You will need to have a few spare bottles for those bigger jobs though.
For the how to use videos or for other Hot Devil products visit the Hot devil website http://hotdevil.com.au.