Bending soft copper pipe

Hello,

Is it feasible to bend 1/2" type L soft copper pipe in a helical pattern around a cylinder of diameter 2 1/8"? Let's leave my motivations out it. What tools would be required to bend the soft copper pipe?

Thanks, Wayne

Reply to
Wayne Whitney
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Take a hard cylinder that is your 2 and 1/8" diameter. ...Put it in a vise....Plug one end of your 1/2 inch copper pipe... fill it tightly with fine sand....bend it around your cylinder.....empty pipe of sand...presto...helical pattern.....Jim

Reply to
Jim & Lil

Bending the tubing is easy. It is your motivations that will make it interesting ;)

In production, tubing is usually bent with a mandrill inside to prevent kinking. You may be able to us a spring to get the same effect, pulling the spring as you go. Putting sand is has worked too, but I've never done it personally so I don't know how simple or difficult it would be. That is a rather tight radius for hand bending, but I used to work in a company that did tighter bends on larger tubing with the right tooling.

Reply to
Edwin Pawlowski

Sounds a lot like a coil for a condenser. DAMHIK.

;-)

Reply to
Andrew

Either he's fixin' to make hisself a 'still, a wort chiller or a tap beer cooler. Whatever it is sounds like worthy project.

Reply to
Ranieri

in case the sand doesn't work, you could also use a spring style tubing bender. they look like an old screendoor spring and the copper tubing fits snugly inside the spring. these benders are in any plumbing department. your mandrel diameter would need to be reduced somewhat to allow for the thickness of the spring (probably about .06"). you could quickly try out this method with a piece of scrap tubing.

bill

Reply to
rider89

Sounds good. The helical coil will be going around a length of 2" copper DWV pipe (0.42" wall thickness, 2 1/8" outer diameter). Will this be strong enough to use as the bending form? That would obviously be easiest.

Cheers, Wayne

Reply to
Wayne Whitney

Wow, that is a great answer! I would have used a snake, and taken 10x as long to do it....

Reply to
glenn P

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