On the day of Tue, 14 Mar 2006 13:38:03 GMT...
"Pete C."
typed these letters:

I'm in the midst of an overhaul of my small home shop (20'x32' detached)
and among the items on the agenda is some fixed air line.

The question is - Black pipe or soldered copper. Black pipe is rather a
pain to work with, heavy and fairly expensive, while type L copper is
much easier to work with and I think actually a bit cheaper overall not
to mention the typical HD / Lowe's black pipe fittings are crap. I think
the nice smooth bore of 1/2" copper will give better air flow rates vs.
1/2" black pipe as well.

I've heard it noted that for copper air lines you should use "hard"
solder. Since all the normal plumbing solder these days is lead-free
silver bearing I'm thinking this qualifies as "hard" solder.

I expect I'll be running the air through one of the cheap HF
refrigerated air dryers in addition to the usual filters to help keep
the new plasma cutter happy. In addition to the plasma cutter, the air
will be serving the air/hyd 20T press, blowguns at the lathe and mill,
and the usual assortment of impact wrench / hammer / nailer / tire
inflator.

Thoughts / suggestions?

Thanks,

Pete C.


If you want something easy to work with... Why not just run an
appropriate sized air hose rated for the pressures you need. Maybe
something like tygon that will even work with push lock connectors.
It doesn't get much easier that that. You may want to clamp it down
some way to avoid it going wild if it ever does come loose.

The company I used to work for used probably miles of tygon type air
lines. They also had some galvanized pipe/rigid conduit. But without
a pipe threader pipe can be a pain. They did have some stainless
steel pipe for air lines connected with compression fittings. I seen
a couple of them compression fittings blow apart though.

Devonshire