Thread about Threads

[The Medway Handyman]

Just been changing all my rad valves for TRV's & new lock shields. System has been in for 28 years + to my knowledge, rads in perfect condition, not a spot of rust anywhere.

Original plan was to use the existing rad tails (for the lock shields) and the existing nuts & olives on the supply/return pipework.

Couldn't use either. The rad tails wouldn't fit the new lock shield valves, did up a few turns but you could feel they weren't 'right'.

Nuts & olives on the existing pipes were even worse, did up half a turn & stopped, no chance of sealing.

In the end I replaced all the rad tails & supply/return pipe connectors. Thank the Lord for olive pullers, large allen keys & percussive maintenance..

Once loose I tried the threads & they definitely weren't right.

Have they changed thread sizes/pitches in the last 28 years?

[Tanner-'op]

Dave,

I seem to remeber that around that time there was a bit of a rumpus about going from the old *imperial* to the new fangled *metric* system - or are you way to young to remeber that? ;-)

(That included changing from BSP etc as well - for the purists amongst us. LOL

Tanner-'op

[Tanner-'op]

Damn,

I must learn how to spell *remember* -- remember,remember,remember,remember - Ithink I have it now :-(

Tanner-'op

[Anne Welsh Jackson]

Very probably. They've changed everything else...

[John Rumm]

Yeah but, plumbing fitting threads are still BSP...

[Tanner-'op]

You're right there John, it is still used in plumbing and pipe-fitting if I remember correctly - not having a good night tonight though, I can't ruddy spell and earlier on, I erroneously 'securely' deleted a folder with around

8 years worth of work in it - ah well, that's life, time to 'hunt' around for the back up floppies and CDs!

Tanner-'op

[EricP]

Yes but usually made "abroad" and they don't to seem to understand what BSP actually is when it comes to making the threads.

I know exactly what he means by "but you could feel they weren't 'right'."

[OG]

Ouch ! Can I suggest an external hard drive and a program such as Karen's Replicator that allows you to schedule copying folders to the backup.

Other programs exist, but this has a light footprint and does a straight file copy so you don't need to 'run' anything to get the backups back.

[Bob Mannix]

About 15-20 years ago there were compression fittings about with different threads and you couldn't guarantee that one make would fit another - I know because I bought both at the time - grrr. This no longer seems to be the case. You would have to be unlucky (I have just been doing the same job on

30-40 year old valves and the new ones fit to the same olive/nut). As others have said, for the iron fittings, BSP has been retained

[nightjar]

Because it was so widely used, BSP was simply redefined as being a metric thread, sized in inches.

Colin Bignell

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Forget the last 28 years - I find 'nuts' from one make won't necessarily fit another properly.

[<me9]

There are some that are a finer thread, the connections to my boiler, and the Danfoss zone valves in my system are 22mm compression, but not BSP, the thread is about 50% more TPI.

[Dave Liquorice]

Quite I deleted an "unrecognised profile" a few months back which turned= out to be a current user... Managed to get a lot back with undelete tool= s but lost some mail folders (piggin OLE keeps everything in single files =

rather than a decent spread directories/single file structure).

I now use SecondCopy to copy everything(*) new/changed below /Documents =

and Settings/ to that users home directory on the server when ever= that user logs off. SecondCopy allows you to keep an archive as well so =

the server has the last two versions of everything as well. If SecondCop= y encounters a problem it'll email the log to me. The server has two discs= under software RAID1 and that is backed up to another, dedicated, drive = in a workstation (3 sets, fullback up once a week with daily increments). I= hope that I'm now pretty safe...

Can Karens Replicator be set to run a given set of instructions when a user logs off? Email someone if it has a problem? And keep multiple copi= es on the destination?

With these sort of copy programs and a NAS device costing less than =A31=

00 it really does mean that there is no excuse for not having a decent back= up system in place. Gone are the days of expensive or slow tape drives and =

multiple tapes and tape changing etc. The initial copy may take a while = to run but after that it's normally only a few tens of seconds.

(*) With a few exceptions like "temporary internet files" etc.

[Tanner-'op]

Thanks OG,

I managed to find all the back-up disks that I have done, and recovered around 99.9999r% of the stuff - only losing what I have done over the last week.

It's lucky that this folder is viewed quite often, but only added to around every couple of months or so.

As for an external hard drive for backups, I have a couple of spare computers hanging around and I have been thinking of setting up a server in a RAID-1 format for a couple of months now as a back-up system - I think that this little error will spur me on to do that job.

Tanner-'op

[Ed Sirett]

Where a joint seals on the thread itself then in all but some very unusually places the threads are BSP now internationalized as Rt and Rp threads.

Radiators are 1/2" and some older ones are bigger.

The back nuts for compression fittings to BS 864 (or equivalent EN) are

1/2 BSP for 15mm stuff.

The threads for other sizes are not BSP.

Some compression fittings don't conform to the standard and the older the fitting the more likely this is to be true. Especially if the back nut is

8-sided.

The main problem with inter-changeability of the backnut+olives is that some (usually older) fittings allowed a longer piece of the pipe to go into the fitting past the olive.

[OG]

Euch, what is it with some users that they cause OE to lose the correct indents when replying ?

Can I say that it sounds lovely, but it's probably more than most people need.

No, but if you want users' actions to be 'replicated' when they log off, you do tend to complete the deletion process rather sooner than may be really desirable. Tho the 2 'back copies' may be useful for a couple of days.

Jolly good.

[whisky-dave]

yes, I'd agree it depends how important your data is. I doubt the home user needs such intense backups. Time machine (Apple) does incremental backups every hour for 24 hours then every day for a week or month then every week for a month or something like that. I'm not sure what I could create in under an hour that would be impossible to recreate, perhaps a high game score. ;-)

depending on what you do of course.

And the floppy. That disapeared for us Mac uses before this millennium started ;-)

Provided you don't do much of course.

[Dave Liquorice]

Well if your only using a PC for playing games or watching youtube I guess so but once you start to write letters on it, use email or usenet, maintain the home finances etc the the data becomes very important. Most people don't realise how important until they want it, perhaps some considerable time after it was lost.

A decent backup scheme is not to protect from the accidental deletion of something, that can be rescued from the trash can. But from a hard disc failure be that a head crash or the machine being nicked.

Never backed up to floppy, the stack kept falling over after 50... I did venture into floppy based tape drives but they were very slow and you had to change tapes and rotate them in ways I could never quite get my head around so backups never really happened. Decent sized and fast tape drives where (and still are) fing expensive.

An alternative to a NAS is of course a multi giga byte USB memory stick and just copy to that. Has the advantage that you can carry it with you so it's also "off site".

Well as OLE maintains it's mail folders in a few flat files just a single new email can make a change to a multi mega byte file. I'm looking at one users OLE directory ATM, comes to 61M and all the files where changed in that last users session. As I said it doesn't take more than a few tens of seconds to copy that lot and a couple of other identies as well, plus anything else that has been worked on.

Even if you do and you want the machine to shutdown after its finished you can set SecondCopy to do that (or restart or return to the login screen) so you don't have to hang around waiting for it.

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember "whisky-dave" saying something like:

Oh, I dunno - imagine you've just transferred some bloody good image files from your camera over to your hard drive and it goes toes up.

I'd think such a thing might happen relatively often these days.

[Dave Liquorice]

Thats why I habitually use "copy" rather than "move", the orginals are still on the source device...