Copper pipe joining ... (Without a sleeve)

It's an expanded pipe joint. They never were that common with water plumbing, and with time being money nowadays and the common fittings costing peanuts, verses the time spent expanding the pipe and the thought you have to put into doing it before installing the pipe, it's well out of favour now with regular plumbing. Still used with aircon pipework though.

Yes, a tube expander.

It was certainly more common with the softer copper tubing of old.

Yes. But IIRC pretty expensive.

Guess I didn't google for the obvious then !!!

Thanks (And to denis@home)

Thanks,

Gordon

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I've got the hand-tool version. It has two sliding formers (15mm + 22mm) and works a bit like a slide hammer with a hammer. It's hard work and not really worth the effort most of the time.

Cic.

A lot of old plumbers did it. I made the tool for 15mm pipe in an electric drill years ago for curiosity.

It was simply to save on the cost of fittings and took only a few seconds to do.

It did make really nice elegent joints as well.

As I said it was easier with the older soft copper pipe. Annealing modern stuff would probably help. But as you say probably not worth the bother.

and 1 fewer joint per, er, join.

In message , Gordon Henderson writes

Yes, its not what a professional would use

The proper (cheaper ones) are hammered home to expand the pipe to create a sleeve. I used one when I last replaced my boiler

Now that we all have SDSes, I wonder if the method might be worth revisiting.

NT

When I bought my last house some years back I inherited masses of 1" pipe in good nick, which encouraged me to turn up on the lathe a simple 'wack it with a hammer' pipe expander to convert to metric sizes. Worked a dream. I made it stepped to accomodate 28mm 22mm &

AWEM

Was the inheritance a coincidence?

Bill

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Previous owner of the house was the heating contractor who fitted out Heathrow term 3 when it was built, and had used 1" copper in nice long lengths all over the house that bore a remarkable similarity to that at the airport!. When I re-boilered and relaid out the heating system (in perhaps 1984) the heavy guage Imperial copper was far to good to chuck - anyway the budget was VERY tight, just like me

AWEM