Bad start to the day

Pretty freaky feeling seeing your LG on fire. When I first got mine I vented it out the sidedoor with no cap on it. High wind sent the flames back out the bottom of the heater. Completely melted all plastic of the controller, burnt an encap machine out, a vac hose, a sprayer. Halve the van was burnt out so lost that too.

Wish Little Giant gave warnings about correct venting techniques. I still use the heater without worries, I do soap spray all gas connections each job. Only takes 10 seconds.

Ryan S wrote:I cleaned the bunker ring about three weeks ago. I did tighten the union pretty good. Guess not enough to losses from vibration. Lesson learned.  

An old mechanic trick on this one. If you lightly score the threads (use a file or even hack saw blade) about half the length of the fitting and then assemble, it will not vibrate loose. That little bit of scoring creates a small burr on the threads that will act as a locking mechanism to discourage vibrating loose.

I watched my father do that for years on Porsche and Audi back in the mid-70's before products like loc-tite became common. Have to admit, that simple trick always seemed to be effective.

While I am on the topic, I will give you another neat tip when tightening bolts without a torque wrench. The tip is to count your fingers. If you tighten a fastener using just your finger strength (don't pull with your arm or curl you hand) you will find that each finger starting with the index finger is about 10 lbs.

So, if you pull the wrench using the first 2 fingers, it would be about 20 lbs of torque. The German mechanics taught us that one when we worked on the VW Scirocco slalom racing cars. I'm sure it isn't an exact science, but I tried it when torquing down a carburetor and it was about 1.5 lbs. off for me, so not a bad trick if in a pinch.