Next up, a tiny bit of plumbing, which is pretty much where I stopped on the build itself for want of a bunch of parts and time to work with them.
This was essentially a trial run to figure out the best way to bend the tubing and where to put the pressure gauge. I used North American 1/4" tube which is really close to the 6mm it is supposed to be but waaaaaaaaaaay cheaper because of the absence of the novelty factor. I welded a socket head cap screw onto the frame to act as a stud and then machined some a spacer to get the pressure gauge set back at the correct distance from the plane of the back splash. This is just a temporary measure until I sort out exactly which adapters and gauge will be used - then I'll design a bracket with the appropriate forward/aft offset and up/down & port/starboard tolerances.
I sourced a couple of tools for bending the copper tubing but in the end because some of the radii are super tight, I built a some custom tools that can be dropped into the bench vise.
I was pretty sure these tools would work really well for small diameter tube, but I wanted to try to make the main HX tube the same way to avoid having to hard braze the connections (silver solder ain't exactly cheap...).
This was essentially a trial run to figure out the best way to bend the tubing and where to put the pressure gauge. I used North American 1/4" tube which is really close to the 6mm it is supposed to be but waaaaaaaaaaay cheaper because of the absence of the novelty factor. I welded a socket head cap screw onto the frame to act as a stud and then machined some a spacer to get the pressure gauge set back at the correct distance from the plane of the back splash. This is just a temporary measure until I sort out exactly which adapters and gauge will be used - then I'll design a bracket with the appropriate forward/aft offset and up/down & port/starboard tolerances.
I sourced a couple of tools for bending the copper tubing but in the end because some of the radii are super tight, I built a some custom tools that can be dropped into the bench vise.
I was pretty sure these tools would work really well for small diameter tube, but I wanted to try to make the main HX tube the same way to avoid having to hard braze the connections (silver solder ain't exactly cheap...).
No comments:
Post a Comment