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Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   an easy solder and a painfully difficult one
Friday, November 2 2007
Today I assembled and soldered a set of copper pipes and fittings allowing me to attach the solar deck's plumbing to the newest panel, which is now fully attached to the solar deck annex. I'd decided to dispense with rubber hoses and use copper pipe instead, since I've decided to gradually migrate to a more solid, better insulated circulation system, one I can more-easily modify and protect from the elements. As always when I make installable-components for a plumbing system, I pressure-tested each of the various components before moving on the make the next. This involved either blowing on one end and holding a suspect joint in water to look for tell-tale bubbles or hooking up a garden hose to a hose fitting, plugging any others that might be open, and testing at 40 psi (household water pressure). As usual, the only joints that leaked were one where I'd soldered slightly-mismatched sizes together. In this case, the most-mismatched combination was a 3/4 inch barbed hose brass fitting to a 3/4 inch copper pipe - in that case the best results came when I didn't de-burr the pipe after cutting it with a pipe cutter. It turns out that the pipe cutter slightly-decreases the inside dimension of pipe as it cuts, and this slight change can mean the difference between an easy solder and a painfully difficult one. I also found that it's possible to use a pipe cutter to decrease the size of the inside dimension of the end of a piece of pipe by "cutting" a quarter inch or so from the end and not cutting all the way through it.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?071102

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