Try a bit of glass tubing from the top end of a borosilicate glass pipette, thats what I prefer to use.
Has a narrow 'waist' which helps keep the gear in one place, whilst the thickness of the glass makes it much harder to burn the gear and being borosilicate glass it will easily stand up to anything you can throw at it with a cigarette lighter (borosilicate glass has a low coefficient of thermal expansion, so is used for lab glass due to low susceptibility to thermal shock, it's just about workable with a blowtorch, although it softens rather than becoming easily ductile)