------------------------------------- Perfectly simple. The spring works a bit like one of those springs that walk downstairs (slinky?). The coils of the 8 or 10mm springs open up slightly with the bend and the spring is removed with a twisting action. Simple if you know how - as some of us do.
------------------------------------------ I know - I've got one. The trouble is (as the OP stated) that it's a bit difficult to gauge the exact position of your bends. Everybody chooses what suits them best.
I also have a home-made bender for making fixed brake pipes which works very well but there's still a need for some free-hand bending.
We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember Stephen saying something like:
Practice. You don't need a pipe bender for 10mm, just a dollop of common sense.
Don't be so ham-fisted. The most common cause of failure on 10mm fittings is over-tightening. Use some gloop for fuel line joints.
Unroll the coil in its natural way - don't pull it off the coil in a spring fashion, stand the coil up and unroll it as you walk along with it between your knees.
I was told it's for fire safety. If there was a fire hot enough to melt the solder, oil would gush everywhere making the fire worse. IIRC the plastic oil pipe can only be used underground; perhaps for the same reasons?
I thought I had read a post here some time ago against bending without using a bender? The post was talking about CH rather than oil, but I think the point was that sludge would deposit around irregularities in a hand bend. Perhaps for oil, this does not matter?
It's a difficult balance: too tight and copper twists everywhere; too loose and puddles of smelly oil!
That's more or less what I was doing; it's reassuring to know I was at least doing something right!
I haven't heard of them; do you mean BES? I've already got a mini-bender from Screwfix; I just don't know how to use it properly ;-)
I would like to try a spring- I imagine they are easier than using springs with 15 and 22mm pipe- but I just placed an order with BES this afternoon and can't justify placing another order just for a spring and a £5.95 carriage charge.
Aye, cut a gas pipe post meter and you'll just get a big yellow flame and all the gas being burnt. Cut an oil pipe and you'll flood the floor with burning oil, it'll be coming out of the pipe *much* faster than it will burn.
i have built a couple of motorhomes, and when plumbing the gas system use what i thought was microbore copper pipe, 10mm for the main feed from the tanks regulator, 8mm for the runs from the manifold to the apliances.
always bought the stuff from the caravan shop (before they got all arsey and stopped selling it to members of the plublic, (i just go to the workshop now and buy it off the fitters for the price of a pint)
likewise they had rolls of the flexi pipe for connecting bottles to the pipework in a van, but will only sell them in 1 meter lengths, i wanted 3 meters for a bbq so i could plug it into the bbq gas outlet on the van, and have the thing well away from the van and awning, no can do, 1 meter lengths only, so as a joke i asked for 3 x 1 meter lengths, a couple of hose tail fittings so i could cut the compression bit off and use the straight brass pipe as a joiner, and 6 jubilee clips, they happily pulled the pipe off the roll, cut into 3 lengths, and sold me the bits to re-join it making the 3 meter length i wanted, but with 6 potential leak points instead of 2.
Anyway, one day i was modifying the gas system, adding an oven i believe, caravan shop was shut, but plumb centre was open, so i went there and asked if they did the 8mm pipe used in caravan gas supplies, they sold me a 10 meter roll of 8mm microbore copper pipe, for what i thought was the bargian price of a fiver (was paying about 2 quid a meter from caravan shop)
then i tried to use the stuff, bloody kink city, turns out the caravan gas pipe is thick walled, the microbore is very thin walled, with the gas pipe i have always bent it by hand, try that with microbore and it ends up in tears,
i even bought a mini pipe bender but couldent get satisfactory bends in the microbore, now i'll never touch the stuff again too, evil stuff,
the copper gas pipe you get from caravan shops nowadays has a plastic coating over it for corrosion resistance, as the gas pipes are run under the floors nowadays, this help make it even more hand bendable, if you can kink that stuff you should stick to crushing rocks with your bare hands for a living :)
anyhoo, if you get too pissed off with the microbore crap, try and get some caravan type gas pipe, you may have to get the 12mm stuff to get the internal bore you need for the flow, but you will get your pipe run done in minutes, bent to the shape you want, with the fittings put on the ends without crushing the pipe,
On the pipe bender angles are marked from 0 to 180 degrees. Surely it's not possible to bend a pipe through 180 degrees and if it were, why would you want to?
On the arm there is "0 R L". I am guessing L=left and R=right but what are they all about?
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