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Smitty Two

In article
,
wrote:

In previous projects I really haven't had the need to dry assemble a
bunch of fittings to get the alignment right and make sure it would
all work before gluing. In the case of some recent work with 2" PVC
I had pipes making a tight 180 turn and together with a 3 way valve,
it all has to align just right with the existing piping in a short
distance with no wiggle room.

So, I put the pipes and fittings together dry first, to make sure they
aligned OK. But there were two problems:

1 - It was very hard to get the dry pipe to bottom in the sockets of
the fittings

2 - It was even harder to then pull them apart.

I tried using some dish washing soap, but it didn't help much. Which
got me to wondering if there are any tricks the pros use?

Never actually tried it, but I've often thought that making some
loose-fit test couplings would be useful. PVC is cheap, just buy some
extra fittings and bore them out enough so that the pipe can bottom out
dry. Maybe spray paint the outside red so you don't accidentally use
them in the final assembly.

Another thing I've done once or twice to solve the problem of making
that last parallel connection is to make an "assembly-facilitating"
dogleg, consisting of 4 elbows and 3 short lengths of pipe.