water glasses

[hoppercar]

memorial day was a good day, after 8years work, fired newly completed rrsc mikado. was very pleased, injectors, and blower worked great !!. I have 2 water glasses as per prototype, both glass bottoms are the same distance above the crown sheet, but the firemans glass shows water a 1/4 inch or maybe 3/8 higher than the engineers side?...???......I did find, that when I bent the heavy brass pipe, from pm research for the top of the water glass, I may not have annealed it good enough, as there was a very slight crack in it, and I could hear it hissing out. ...was wondering with a leak, in the top pipe, if there was enough pressure differential to raise that glass level slighty?..in the meantime, I'm going to take it off and bend up another pipe.

[FLtenwheeler]

Yes the leak will give you a false reading.

Tim

[cbrew]

yes, the leak will raise (in your case) or lower depending where the leak is. even a leaking valve will screw with the level

[Builder01]

I'm not sure I would have fired a boiler with a brass pipe that has a known crack in it. The crack should not have gotten past the hydro test stage. It could have completely failed under steam. That would be pretty exciting!! - David

[hoppercar]

yeah, I wouldn't have either...but it never showed up till it was hot....but, anyway, I took the pipes off for both water glasses, and am going to bend new ones out of copper. ...I wasn't comfortable bending that heavy wall brass tubing from pm research anyway, I called them about it. they said to anneal it good before bending, must not have been soft enough. ....gonna stick with the soft copper now...

[cbrew]

when i bend brass pipe, it need to be a dull red, it works very easy at that temp

[Soot n' Cinders]

I had issues attempting to bend the heavy wall brass too. Even heating to cherry and quenching, it was still too hard to bend for my liking and I was afraid of either breaking my tool or collapsing the pipe. Which I did wind up collapsing a pipe at one point. After that, I switched everything to 0.032" wall copper tubing from McMaster.

[cbrew]

I had issues attempting to bend the heavy wall brass too. Even heating to cherry and quenching, it was still too hard to bend for my liking and I was afraid of either breaking my tool or collapsing the pipe. Which I did wind up collapsing a pipe at one point. After that, I switched everything to 0.032" wall copper tubing from McMaster.

did you try working it hot?

[Soot n' Cinders]

I had issues attempting to bend the heavy wall brass too. Even heating to cherry and quenching, it was still too hard to bend for my liking and I was afraid of either breaking my tool or collapsing the pipe. Which I did wind up collapsing a pipe at one point. After that, I switched everything to 0.032" wall copper tubing from McMaster.

did you try working it hot?

I did, but was a bit much for me. I prefer cold working metal usually so I dont burn myself. Was too easy to get burnt on some of the smaller pieces.

[cbrew]

I had issues attempting to bend the heavy wall brass too. Even heating to cherry and quenching, it was still too hard to bend for my liking and I was afraid of either breaking my tool or collapsing the pipe. Which I did wind up collapsing a pipe at one point. After that, I switched everything to 0.032" wall copper tubing from McMaster.

did you try working it hot?

I did, but was a bit much for me. I prefer cold working metal usually so I dont burn myself. Was too easy to get burnt on some of the smaller pieces.

ok,

[Harold_V]

It should be noted that not all copper alloys respond to being worked hot. Some are "hot short", which means that they become brittle when hot.

H

[cbrew]

It should be noted that not all copper alloys respond to being worked hot. Some are "hot short", which means that they become brittle when hot.

H

my experience is limited to the 6 foot joints of brass and hard copper one gets from mcmaster carr.