Introduction

Brazing is great for bicycle frame and rack building. It's complementary to welding. As a process it's fairly straightforward, like soldering at a higher temperature. The hard bit is finding suppliers for the consumables.

Heat Sources

Oxygen fuel torches

Advantages

Can be used for a variety of tasks including cutting steel

Disadvantages

Limited options for gas as a DIYer. Businesses rent the bottles per month but for a DIYer who's going to use them infrequently that makes it too expensive.

Very small disposable bottle kits the gas is really expensive, even if the initial cost is low. £200 for gas, torch, goggles, and ignighter. Good for a one off. The torch also looks very small. 2.2ltrs Oxygen £32

OxyAcetylene torch kit £224 has a trolley, goggles, torch, hoses and flashback arrestors. The trolley is part of the safety equipment to make sure the bottle don't fall over, and to secure them.

Hobbyweld

Hobbyweld offer bottles rent free, a small acetylene bottle is £120 deposit. It's a 5ltr bottle with 8kg tare. It won't hold anywhere near that much acetylene because it's disolved in acetone. Unfortunately there's a single plant in europe that supplies Hobbyweld so it's not available for new customers. The oxygene is £70 deposit for a small bottle.

As you may be aware, we - like many other suppliers of Acetylene in the UK - outsource the filling of our Acetylene cylinders to a plant in Europe. We regret to inform you that despite having plenty of new cylinder stock, we continue to have difficulty getting the product filled. We are not currently able to get a substantial product flow from our contracted supplier and this is causing much frustration to end users, stockists and ourselves.

This has been an on-going issue for a while now and I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your understanding and patience during this difficult period.

For now, current status remains unchanged with major supply restrictions from the external filling plant, with no assurance from them to when current shortages are going to end.

Gas UK

£110, £50 for 10ltrs oxygen £60 deposit
£190, £90 for 10ltrs acetylene £100 deposit
£75, £25 for 5ltrs of propylene £50 deposit

Deposit within 1 year is 100% return and after 3 years it goes to 0%

Not using acetylene makes it much cheaper and safer, acetylene is not to be messed with, it disolved in acetone, in a honeycomb structure to stop it exploding and has limitations on how much can be drawn from a cylinder.

A complete OxyPropylene setup would be £435, £250 for the kit and £185 for the gas.

BOC

£10 per month rental for each of the oxygen and acetylene cylinder
Oxygen £20 6ltrs
Acetylene £70 for 5.7ltrs ( probably cylinder size rather than actual acetylene)

https://www.boconline.co.uk/shop/en/uk/acetylene-size-k-15-k