15 LED Motion Sensor Light [batt pwrd] Aldi heads up.

Thanks for that, just what i need.

Lots of other DIY stuff

Drill bit sets are excellent, had some before.

Even more stuff here;

Those 'crimping pliers' look exactly the same as the wonderful CK automatic wire strippers.

Pipe bender for £10?

Cable rods for £7?

Be aware... YMMV but in my experience most of the 'hurry while' items aren't available in my local store [s] and staff won't/can't tell you where they are.

I bought one of their small pipe benders today - max 10mm pipe. I haven't used it yet, but it looks quite well made and robust. Need it to make a 10mm spiral for a DIY heat exchanger.

If it doesn't work you can buy an external bending spring for 10 mm pipe. You can just wrap it around a bit of wood as you slide the spring along.

Thanks. I'll keep that in mind, but I've a feling that the pipe bender will do the job ok.

I bought one a month or so back. Not used it yet, but one cheaper aspect of it over my 15/22mm pipe bender is that it relies on sliding on the copper tube (versus the 15/22mm pipe bender which is frictionless on the tube). Maybe worth lubricating.

I also have their cable rods (from a couple of years back). The ends do come off the plastic rods sometimes. So far, I haven't lost a rod inside anything.

They also shed fibreglass splinters occasionally.

Owain

Especially when a rod manages to hit e.g. a herringbone strut and snakes its way back to towards you ... I've only snapped *one* that way!

Yes. Nasty.

Watch out for the screwdriver bit sets though, the crosspoint bits are all philips so not much use for mainstream UK stuff. Same for the long screwdrivers.

These are on clearance at mine, 3.99 or thereabouts, plenty of stock too. That said, I think some stores are designated as clearance centres and get the last dregs of stock from other branches before the finally give up on trying to sell them.

Turned out to be almost useless for what I wanted, no way will it make a nice symmetrical spiral - kinks the tube too if you're not extremely careful. I'll try Dennis's suggestion next time. I'm sure that it would be ok for 'routine' bends though.

I got a set a couple of weeks ago - excellent. Not up to pro usage, but plenty good for general stuff.

If using a spring you'll need to move it along progressively and probably earlier than you think to avoid trapping it (removing it requires too much force) but then you may run into the problem of the previously made section deforming again.

Another method involves filling the pipe with dry sand, packing it down tightly and capping the ends before bending round a former. Microbore should be soft enough to do this without heating but if you do heat it then make a small hole in an end cap to release expanding gasses.

You inviting the Baldwin Sisters round to sample some of your Recipe?

Owain

He's doing it the hard way for that..

You get some 10x15 mm spigot reducers and drill them through so the 10 mm pipe slides through. You put some 22 x 15 x 15 tees on a length of 22 mm pipe and thread the

If you use plastic you can coil it up to save space.

Try annealing the copper first (heat it up with a blowlamp and allow to cool). The tube is annealed originally, but vibration caused by transport and handling (including uncoiling it) will slowly reverse this by work- hardening.

Another trick you could try is packing the tube full of dry sand before bending. This was a common method before modern pipe benders were so easily available, and I have used it to bend 28mm copper over a bag of sand, as I have no 28mm pipe bender. You want a clean non-sharp sand such as sand-pit sand inside the pipe. Not sure how well it will work in thin tube, and getting it compacted to start with may be difficult too. (Another traditional way was to fill the tube with lead, and melt the lead where you want the bend, with the solid lead plugs either side maintaining the pressure preventing the tube collapsing. Probably not practical, and you can't wash all the lead out as it will 'tin' the inside of the tube;-)

On 13 Aug 2014, Simon Cee grunted:

These looked absolutely perfect for several applications here that I can think of, so I hightailed it down to Aldi this morning and bought three.

On trying them out at home, though, I was pissed off to find that the first one didn't work in 'motion-sensitive' mode; very pissed off to find that neither did the second; and incredulous that neither did the third!

It took a while for it to dawn on me what was wrong... the units are evidently designed only to operate when it's dark! When I took them into a dark cupboard to test they all worked fine. as my teen would say.

I'm sure if I'd only bought one unit I'd have just returned it without thinking further on it (and there's nothing in the blurb about the daylight over-ride function. I'd be interested to know how many returns Aldi get!