Pipes - The awkward bit.

[Colin Stamp]

Hi all,

I've never been particularly wonderful with the pipe benders but I've just managed to quite impress myself, so I thought I'd post some photos for you all to heap praise on and not take the piss out of at-all.

This was all to get past a pier that supports the steel over the opening to the new extension. It was doubly awkward because further down, there's no room for both pipes on the underside of the joist, so one has to go on the face. Hopefully, it should all be plain sailing from here on...

Cheers,

Colin.

[Andrew Gabriel]

Very nice. I still have a few spare lengths in the loft like that, but when I went to offer them up to the brackets, I found one bend in the middle somewhere was in the opposite direction to where it was meant to go!

You should protect the pipework so it can't come into contact with any mortar, even if it moves.

[Bill Wright]

Why not start making these?

Bill

[Piers]

Good job, but how many goes did it take and how much useless bent pieces of pipe do you now have :-).

Personally I now tend to do a lot less bending and more soldering - I don't mean using elbows and the like, but I mean doing small numbers of bends on smallish pieces of pipe and then cutting to fit and soldering them together with couplers. Overall I think I ends up with less wasted copper as I get the job right first time, but then I've never managed anything as intricate as yours in one piece!

[Stephen]

for accurate positioning of the bends and hence minimal pipe wastage, McKeown's Table is your friend.....

[Tim Watts]

On Monday 21 October 2013 19:49 Colin Stamp wrote in uk.d-i-y:

Top quality - well done!

[Dave Liquorice]

That looks horribly similar to BillP's pipe bending .pdf that is in the uk.d-i-y FAQ. Linked from the bottom of:

[Colin Stamp]

I haven't seen that before. That'll come in handy for the rest of the job.

Cheers,

Colin.

[Colin Stamp]

In the past, there'd be an enormous pile of "practice" pieces but it all went miraculously well this time.

That was my backup method. i.e. try to get it right but cut it and re-join if not. I can't believe all the bends went right first time. I'll no doubt drive a plasterboard screw through one of the pipes when I put the ceiling back up...

Cheers,

Colin.

[Colin Stamp]

Yep - I've done a few of those in the past. I'm also quite good at doing it with mitres on coving...

I'd wondered about that. There's a fair amount on clearance, but I might try heating up some 21.5mm overflow pipe and seeing if it will slide into position.

The issue is much worse at the other end of the steel where I've run the heating flow and return in 22mm plastic through a similar gap. That really does grind into the mortar. I think I'll try to find some plastic sheet material to slide in there...

Cheers,

Colin.

[Colin Stamp]

The plumbing in this house is already a bit noisy. I feel this would make matters worse :o)

Cheers,

Colin.

[Andrew Gabriel]

With copper, it's not just grinding, but you will at some point get condensation on the pipe, and copper+mortar+moisture = corrosion.

[Andrew Gabriel]

Didn't know anyone had worked that out. I remember sitting down and working it out from scratch when I started installing the central heating. My method of doing offsets was different though (adjust the angle of the middle piece assuming it has no straight piece between the two bends, rather than fixing the angle and adjusting the length of the middle straight, which would have made the offset too long in most of my cases).

[Piers]

My pipe benders (Iwrin IIRC) come with similar instructions, but it's always seemed like too much brain power is required ;-).

[Roger Mills]

Useful. Doing one bend is fairly easy, but getting subsequent bends in the right place and direction is the challenge!

When I installed central heating in my first house about 45 years ago, I only had bending springs which went inside the pipe - which you then bent over your knee. I had real fun with one pair of pipes which needed to be bent into a Z shape to go over the landing. The bends were a long way from the ends of the pipe such that the bending spring disappeared inside the pipe - with a piece of strong string tied to it to pull it out. ISTR that the trick was to bend the pipe slightly more than required, then unbend it a bit - to make it easier to pull the spring out.

That was in the days of imperial pipe sizes, where there were several different wall thicknesses - so you had to make sure you had the correct spring, appropriate to the particular ID.

[Huge]

Awesome, thank you. I hope I can remember where I've filed that when I need it!

[Bob Minchin]

+1, I was just thinking this as I saved the pdf file in the ever increasing "that could come in useful" folder

[Andrew May]

The problem seems to be not one of remembering where it is (Search will usually find it) but rather remembering that you actually have it. I have several documents where I have more than one copies because I have come across it several times.

[Onetap]

My father worked on building sites in the 60s & early 70s. A Sikh plumber started on one site; this was in the days when any immigrants were unusual.

The Sikh sat in a corner in his lunch hour and started tapping at a piece of scrap copper and turned it into a working snake-charmer's type of whistle, with the flared end, a typical touristy souvenir.

[Huge]

+1

Although things have improved since I installed Tracker. (A Linux filesystem indexing tool.)