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for want of the right tool to bend a pipe
Thursday, January 18 2024
Weeks ago, Gretchen had planned for our friend Gilley in Portland to fly out to meet Gretchen in Manhattan today and then they'd both ride back Upstate in a bus to celebrate Gretchen's birthday tomorrow. But at the last minute Gilley had to cancel because of a problem with the assisted living facility hosting her mother, which resulted in that horrible woman having to temporarily come back to live with Gilley. This wouldn't've been a problem had Gilley's partner Allen been available, but he'd responded to an emergency at their cabin (seven hours away in Joseph, a small town in eastern Oregon) and then gotten trapped there because terrible weather closed a section of I-84. (To me this all sounded a lot like the kind of excuses Nigerian romance scammers use in order to avoid ever meeting their victims, but I digress.) Gretchen ended up taking a bus into the City today anyway, since she'd made plans to meet up with other people there as well.
In the mail today came a flaring tool capable of flaring 5/8 inch (outside diameter) copper pipe, the larger of the two pipes carrying refrigerant for the new split. It was bitterly cold outside, but at some point I assembled a bucket of tools, put on something to listen to broadcast via an FM frequency from my computer, put on my rubber boots, hoodie, and lightweight gloves, and then went out to where the outside unit of the split is mounted (to a bracket on the east side of the garage). I had some trouble cutting the soft copper pipe square, and this caused issues with what would be the flange when I flanged it. To compensate for this, I tried flaring with a little extra material sticking out of the flaring tool. But this was a mistake, causing the flare produced to have two tears in it. So I had to do it again. But then I had another problem: because of the the proximity of the outside unit to the wall, I had to make a tight bend in the pipe, and I didn't have any tool to help me with this except my bare hands. But it turns out that it's impossible to bend a pipe that thick that tightly without it flattening. After having to cut away two flattened sections of pipe, I realized that I needed a proper tool for this. I have springs that you can slip over a pipe to secure it while it is bent, but these don't work if there is a flare on the pipe.
So I loaded up the dogs (this was the first time Charlotte happily jumped into a vehicle with me standing next to it) and drove out to Home Depot. I don't have much experience with pipe bending tools, so the tool I ended up buying was a long-handled device for bending half-inch steel electrical conduit.
Back at the house, I thought it would be wise to use the new tool to try bending some piece of pipe other than the precious one running to the outdoor unit of the split. So I tried bending a conventional piece of half-inch pipe. The bend sort of worked, but it had some ugly wrinkles in it. At this point I realized I needed to know more about the subject, so I did some Googling and learned that there are special tools for bending copper pipe, and they look nothing like the conduit bender I'd bought. So I drove to Herzog's, thinking maybe they'd have what I needed. They didn't, though they thought I should try HZ Electrical Supply over on Morton Blvd. (the shortcut between Albany Avenue and Boices Lane). But when I got there, they said they didn't have any such tool. They suggested I try Winsupply, the plumbing place several hundred feet away. But that place closes at 4:00pm, and it was later than that. So I thought I'd return to Home Depot and check out their plumbing tools, figuring that the various mom & pop stores I'd been checking likely have a common policy of never recommending big box stores. Sure enough, I found a copper pipe bending tool at Home Depot, and it seemed capable of bending the kind of pipe I had.
But back at the house, I soon realized the tool I had just bought wasn't big enough to bend the pipe I needed to bend. I'd seen that it could bend 5/16th inch pipe and somehow read that as 5/8ths. Not only that, but I actually already had the very tool I'd bought, though I'd bought it many years ago from Harbor Freight, so it probably won't last more than one or two uses.
So I had to give up on my dreams of finishing the split installation today, in time for Gretchen's birthday.
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