I have brazed copper pipe before. My plumber mate showed me how. Its very simple to my understanding. you need, wire wool, flux, solder, and of course a heat source. Clean the fittings and pipe where they will touch, rub a bit of flux onto the outside of the pipe and the inside of the fitting, Push togther the pipe and fitting and make dure they point the right directions, then heat the bugger up. Once its hot get your solder and just wave it accross the join. If youve got it hot enough and enough flux the solder will melt and just dissapear into the joint. Job done.
The response by fivecheebs above appears to be talking about soldering, but the brazing process is similar -- just takes a bit more heat. I use MAPP gas from Bernzomatic. It burns hotter than standard propane. Next, you need some brazing rods. I use phosphorous-copper . It helps a little if you do clean the copper parts you want to join before you start brazing, but flux is not needed. Position the two parts to be joined together, then start heating. Then heat some more. Then heat for a while. The easiest way for me to know when the copper is hot enough for the brazing to be effective is to melt a small drop from the end of the brazing rod onto the copper. When the copper is not yet hot enough, the brazing material will form a nice small bead. When the copper gets up to the right temperature, the bead will start to "flow" into the copper. The copper itself doesn't melt. Once the bead has started flowing, you then apply the brazing rod directly to the hot copper, and it too should basically "flow" into the copper material, forming a nice join between the two pieces. Hope that helps! Ciao
He was probably right -- I'm just speaking from my very limited experience. I learned how to braze the way the cat learned to swim. Anyway, here's a ton of info on the process from the wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazing Cheers.
Thanks guys. All my questions are answered. Maybe in the future I will be building a phase unit and have you to thank. There was some confusion between soldering and brazing that I had. Soldering pipes is nothing new to me but brazing is diferent. Thanks again guys.
Nice work with the blocks! made me want to finnish my gpu block (which I cant do becuase the neighbours dont like the niose of the dremmel) Ill be interesting to see the finnished blocks espcially the gpu block Ive done a lot of soldering but only a small amount of braizing. afaik for a good joint flux is required, but you need special flux (not soldering flux) which doesnt mind the very high temps. I found that the braize on mine leaked, and was alway slightly porus. Not sure if that becuase of my lack of braizing skill and the fact they were very difficult joints or just that the filler I used was too porus - I think it was 80%brass 15%silver 5%nickel or something... A way to fix any porousity is to solder afterwards. Solder i abosorbed into the porous brass which fixes any possible slow leaks. Soldering is more than adequate for watercooling, only need to braize stuff if its under high pressures like in phase change.
I decided yesterday that Im going to finnish it, but by a different method. Im have painted the block, and Im going to use electrolytic etching to erode away the copper, which is not covered by paint. This will use up quite a bit of paint as I will have to repaint the block as the cut gets deeper to stop undercutting. Im quite interested in how well this would work anyway, considering it will use almost no effort.
Progress on two fronts. So the painting of the manifold didn't come out as expected. The object on the right is the cap to the spay-paint can -- that's what I was expecting. You can see the results on the left. Not quite as shiny and reflective as advertised. Construction of the radiator is going slow. It takes a long frickin time to heat all the copper to point where brazing can actually occur. Anyway here's some partial progress shots: Some good news -- the end mills I ordered finally arrived: Thats a 1/8-inch and a 1/2-inch, which should be good for some face work. Channels in the GPU waterblock are coming along nicely: The imprecision of the drill press makes it a close call, but I think it's actually going to work. Just as long as I don't slip up. Also, it's very loud, so I had to stop before I went deaf. As soon as I get some ear plugs, I'll continue. More to come!
errrr, you seem to be brazing in your kitchen, is this normal? well, at least I don't have to worry about modding space when I move to a house with no outside space...
I doubt it's normal, but it works! I live in a condo, so I have no garage, no basement, no real work area. Only good place is the kitchen.
Update July 30 Always use the right tool for the job. That's whay they say, right? Heh. Having no band saw, and not wanting to spend six hours with the hack saw, I figured I could cut my large block of copper in two with the drill press. Initially, it was a huge success: Sadly, this effort seems to have burnt out the motor. So, it might be a little while before I make any progress on the GPU and HD waterblocks. Great googlie-mooglie. Work progresses on the radiator: Here we have a closeup of the manifold during leak testing: Yikes! Not what I wanted to see: Aha, the culprit: Obviously a slack job with the brazing. I should have known this wasn't watertight, but I got lazy a fell into wishfull thinking. The lumpiness of the brazing filler is the first indication that the base metal didn't get hot enough for proper brazing. The bubbles on part of the filler show that the filler was just boiling away without truly bonding to the base copper. That'll learn me. On a brighter note, I decided to replace my ghetto pump/resavoir, which consited of a $20 fish tank pump in tupperware, with a real pump: The choice was between this Danger Den CSP-MAG, or the Eheim 1250. The CSP-MAG has slightly better head pressue, and a built in RPM monitor, using one of the motherboards fan pins. I've also started putting together a simple Samurize config, keeping with the art deco machinery look: The main dial is CPU temp with highest-temp marker (the shadow pointer), and the inset dial is pump RPM. I'll add other gauges for network transmissions, and maybe some other info. How does it look? Cheers.
The Samurize config looks great. Thank god for leak test or you would have been screwed if you didn't know about the leak.
A little bit more work on the Samurize config: The "digital" network speed displays are a bit chunky because there is no anti-aliasing on the font. Ah well, I don't know that I want to take the time to figure out how to implement a visual plugin for Samurize to fix it. Anybody know a good Photoshop tutorial that'll show me how to do the copper pipes to connect the gauges together? More hardware photos coming soon. Cheers.
Have it like a guages where the pipes go like: Code: 0 0 0 | | | ------------- ^^goes off to the left of thee screen.
