Hello, my name is Rick Barron.

Thank you for joining us today.

I am here representing the plumbing and HVAC trade, and we are overhauling a heating system and installing a new boiler and a complete new heating system.

We have an opportunity here to lay out all of the tools of the trade and go over some of the trade skills while we are working on site.

[melodic music] First thing when you're setting up in construction of any type is to take into consideration the safety of yourself and the safety of others around you.

Always make sure you have a pair of safety glasses on hand.

Safety glasses are important.

Hard hats, if there's any overhead hazards and if you are working around people that are working above you, generally on a construction site, you need to have a hard hat.

Gloves, we have our fire extinguisher right here in case of emergency, earplugs because burning acetylene is very loud.

Also, there's a lot of tools and there's a lot of materials.

We want to be working ergonomically, so we like to work with tables.

We like to work with tripods.

We like to work with things where we're not bending over or reaching up or twisting our bodies in ways that don't work for the human body.

Having an organized table and having an organized set of tools is very important for efficiency and for safety.

The first plumbing trade skill we're going to talk about today is sweating or soldering copper pipe.

We're going to have an open flame.

We are going to have hot materials.

We need to make sure that we guard ourselves and we guard others.

First of all, you make sure there's no tripping hazards because you're going to be handling a torch with a flame.

You need to make sure that you're wearing safety glasses at all times because you're dealing with a flame.

And as you'll see, there will be hot metal flowing.

Always be wearing gloves.

If we do accidentally touch something, then the gloves will protect us.

This is an acetylene torch.

We have an acetylene tank over here.

Acetylene is a gas that will burn hot enough to melt solder and create a sealed fitting on the pipe.

This acetylene tank is strapped to this column over here, so that it cannot fall over.

All tanks must be secured in a way where they can't fall over.

So we're going to go through how to prep the pipe, how to solder the pipe, and how to create a finished product of sweating and soldering copper.

So first of all, this is a tripod that I have set up at a working height that ergonomically works for a hands-on approach.

There's a chain.

We take the pipe, we put it in the tripod, we wrap the chain around it, and we turn this to the right and tighten the chain down.

And this secures the pipe so it can't fall off.

It's going to be very hot, so we don't want this going anywhere.

The next thing you have to do when soldering pipe is you take sand cloth and you need to clean the pipe so that it's nice, shiny copper.

So you take the sand cloth and you just get it so it's nice and shiny.

And there's no oil mark, there's no fingerprints.

And this allows a surface for the solder to melt and adhere to.

There's one other thing that we must do to prep the pipe, and that is to use flux and apply it to the new shiny, clean copper.

This also allows the solder to adhere to the pipe.

A lot of fluxes will say that it's self-cleaning, but good practice is to always clean the pipe anyways.

So now that we've prepped the pipe, we're going to take to the fitting.

This fitting is called N90.

It's an inch and a half copper 90.

It's an inch and a half inside diameter, which matches this inch and a half pipe.

Same thing, we need to clean the inside of the fitting.

And they make brushes for a quick spin inside the fitting.

Nice and shiny.

You do both sides.

And again, you need to take the flux and give it a nice coating all on the inside of the pipe.

You try not to get the flux on you.

It's acidic, not acidic in a way that's going to really hurt you, but if you get it in a cut or in your eyes then it's not going to feel good.

So then you assemble the pipe.

You make sure that it's made all the way in.

That means the fitting is bottomed out onto the pipe.

So now we have one side prepped.

We need to take the other pipe for the other side of the fitting.

Good practice is to always solder a fitting with pipe in both sides of the fitting.

You don't want to solder or sweat pipe when you have an open side of the fitting, because when you solder the next side after, you could heat up and break the joint from your first solder.

And I'll show you what I'm talking about in a minute.

It's nice and shiny.

I'm coating a flux.

Make sure it's bottomed out all the way.

You want to give it a little twist, and it kind of spreads the flux out.

And now we're ready to solder.

We have our fire extinguisher right here in case of an emergency.

I have a torch tip right here ready to go.

I've already turned on my acetylene tank, and I have a tool that's ready to shut off the acetylene tank in case of an emergency also.

You have to have the ability to extinguish a fire, and you have to have the ability to shut off your tank immediately if needed.

There's a pressure regulator on the acetylene tank to turn the gas up or down.

It's already preset and ready to roll.

This is a striker.

When you turn the knob on this handle, acetylene gas will come out of this tip.

The solder today in today's day and age is lead-free.

Copper is used for domestic water systems-- our drinking water-- so all fittings and all pipe must be lead-free now.

And all solder must be lead-free now.

So I am going to solder this.

And before I start, I will just tell you that this is a large tip for this acetylene tank.

It should go fairly quickly.

You want to make sure you always heat up the pipe before the fitting, because the pipe, as it heats up, will expand and it will keep the fitting from sliding off.

If you heat up the pipe first, the pipe doesn't move around.

And then also, you want to bring the flame in towards the back of the fitting because the heat draws in the solder as it melts.

OK, so now that we've prepared the copper to solder, we decided we were going to take some other safety precautions.

I put on a sturdier shirt because we're soldering.

And I spilled coffee earlier, and I was wearing white.

[laughter] And now I'm wearing a blue shirt that is a better application for this situation.

So we are going to solder this pipe.

[tool roaring] You can see the solder draw in to the back of the fitting, and it makes a nice silver ring all the way around.

You can see it melting.

You can take the solder and kind of flick off the excess.

And then you take your rag.

The best rags have been well used because they're full of flux.

And if you remember from earlier, the flux is self-cleaning.

So when the solder has set up and solidified in the fitting, you can tell if the solder is still molten that it will-- it'll spread out.

And now you can kind of see it solidifying and turning hard.

So once it's all turned hard, you can take your rag and you just scrub it down.

And you have a nice, clean soldered joint.

So the next method of joining a pipe that we are going to do is brazing.

Brazing is different than soldering.

Brazing happens at a much higher temperature.

And we will be using a different product.

This is a silver alloy, silver solder, rather than the tin and copper that melts at around 400 degrees.

This is going to require hotter temperatures.

You will see the copper get cherry red.

And it's a stronger joint that holds up under much higher pressures.

First, I will show you a simple method of cutting the copper.

I have a mark here that I measured.

And you-- this is a rigid 15 cutter, very standard.

All plumbers should have one of these basic tools.

It has a wheel, and it has a knob.

You open it wide enough by loosening it.

You put it on the pipe on your mark.

You tighten it down on your mark.

And when it's tight, you do a circle around the pipe clockwise.

And then you just continue to tighten the knob as you turn the cutter.

And now, we have a nice, clean, straight cut.

There's no real prep required with brazing.

I do still clean the pipe out of good practice, make it a little shiny, make it a little shiny.

The fitting's already been cleaned.

And unlike soldering, you don't need flux.

So we're going to, again, put the copper in the tripod, make it nice and secure.

We're going to just fit the fitting on, make sure it's snug.

Twist it, make sure it's all the way in.

And do the other side.

And we're going to braze now.

This is our silver solder braze.

We have a acetylene torch.

These come in straight lengths.

If you heat up the middle of it, you can bend it so that it's easier to apply to the fitting.

And you'll see what I'm talking about in a minute.

Making sure our earplugs are in, our safety glasses are on, our gloves are on, and here we go.

[tool roaring] And that creates a joint that can sustain much higher pressures than a standard soldered joint.

They use brazing joints in applications with high pressure refrigerants and medical gases, as opposed to a standard solder joint would just be a heating system with a low pressure or domestic water providing your drinking water or the water you bathe in to your plumbing fixtures.

After you've completed your brazed joint, you want to apply water to cool it down because it will stay hot for a long time.

And a wet rag will also clean the joint up.

So I'm just going to pour water onto my rag here.

If you're doing a lot of brazed joints, it's good to have a five gallon bucket or a container of water you can dip your rag in.

As you can see, the water's immediately turning into steam because it's so hot.

And this is what a finished braze joint ought to look like.

[electronic music] So now that we've gone over soldered joints and brazed joints, there's new technology now called ProPress.

ProPress fittings have a gasket inside of them and a ring around the outside.

And we have a tool with jaws that encapsulates the ring and squeezes it down so that the gasket seals around the outside of the pipe.

So we're still using standard copper pipe.

We need to make sure that the joint is all the way to the end of the pipe.

And we need to take a marker and mark all the way around it.

And then we need to pull it off and make sure that the mark matches how far the pipe goes into the fitting.

If this isn't pushed all the way onto the pipe, you will have a faulty joint.

And it could lead to leaks and property damage.

So we always want to make sure we make that mark around.

So we're going to put this on here all the way on.

This is the tool we use.

These are the jaws.

There's a pin, and you can pull the jaws out and replace them with different sizes.

Again, this is 3/4.

We have the 3/4 jaws.

So these insert into here and you push the pin in.

There's a button in the back.

It's standard.

You make sure you have a green light.

The green light means the battery is good to go.

And then this rotates, so whatever is comfortable for making the joint.

You press these two wings to open it.

You make sure that they are lined up on the ridge of the fitting.

You make sure that the ridge is encapsulated by the jaws, and then you hold the trigger.

[tool buzzing] And when it pops, it's secure.

And then you hit the wings and pull it off.

And you have a solid joint that's just as good as a soldered or a brazed joint.

The next method of assembling pipe and fittings that we're going to talk about is PEX.

This is Uponor hePEX.

They also make AquaPEX.

HePEX is used for heat.

AquaPEX is used for domestic water applications.

This cross-linked polyethylene pipe has a memory.

That means when it changes size, it goes back to its original size.

So the way you assemble this pipe is you expand the pipe and you insert the fitting into it.

And because the cross-linked polyethylene pipe has a memory, it shrinks back down onto the fitting.

And we have a special tool that we'll show you in a minute.

This is the pipe.

This is a PEX ring.

The PEX ring goes over the pipe.

This ring is made of the same material of this PEX and also has a memory.

So this creates another layer of pipe basically that will also shrink down and create two barriers that shrink down onto the fitting.

So it's just an extra layer of pipe to create the seal on top of the fitting.

This is a PEX gun.

They have manual PEX guns that you actually have to use levers to expand it.

And they also have pneumatic ones, which means they run off of an air compressor.

This is the most standard.

It runs on a 12 volt battery.

And-- [whirring] --it does the work for you.

So now that we have our PEX ring on the PEX, we need to locate our fitting.

This is a PEX 90.

As you can see, there's a barbed ridge on the fitting.

When the PEX seals on top of this, it seals on that ridge to create a watertight joint.

I'm going to show you how you use the PEX gun.

You insert it into the pipe with the ring, and you'll see, if you look very close, that the head will spin as it's expanding.

And that just creates a joint that has a uniform expansion all the way around.

[whirring] Once it's all the way buried to the end, you give it a couple extra expansions.

You just take the fitting, and you put it in until it's up against the stops on the fitting.

And depending on the temperature, if it's a very cold day, it'll take a little while to set up.

Today is a pretty warm, humid day.

And as you can see, the expansion has contracted onto the top of the fitting in about 30 seconds.

It will be impossible for a human to pull this out of the pipe.

This is most common now in residential applications.

PEX is a lot less expensive than copper.

So you'll see these in homes all over the United States.

The tool is fairly inexpensive compared to a ProPress tool.

Once you have this, and you can buy the PEX and the fittings, you can do the plumbing in any home.

Black iron can be used for heating systems where you have forced hot water going through pipes to heat your building.

It can also be used for gas piping, where you have liquid propane gas or natural gas serving different types of equipment that use combustion to heat, or your stove, or your dryer.

So we're going to go over how you install the fitting.

We're going to use our tripod to create a solid working space.

So we tighten that down, and now it can't move.

In gas applications, we only use-- this is called pipe dope.

And it's a Teflon-- it's a Teflon dope for a positive leakproof seal that you brush onto the threads.

So with gas piping, if you are using this for gas, you only use pipe dope.

If you're using this for water applications, like heating systems, then you're going to use Teflon tape and pipe dope.

The reason you don't use Teflon tape for gas piping, if this is being used to supply gas to different equipment, is there can be little pieces of the tape that end up in the pipe and they plug up the equipment.

There's valves inside of the equipment that this can damage.

So we're just going to pretend like we're using this pipe for a heating application.

And we're going to use Teflon tape and pipe dope.

So you want to use Teflon tape first.

If you put your finger through the middle of the roll and hold out a piece, you want to always-- and remember this because it won't work if you don't-- apply this clockwise.

So you start on the front of the threads, you hold it with your other hand, and you wrap it one time around clockwise.

And then you'd roll it three or four times.

So I wrapped it three times.

And now we have Teflon tape all the way around the threads.

And then you just take your hand with a glove and squeeze it and push it onto the threads.

And as you can see, it creates a Teflon seal around the threads.

And then you just take your pipe dope, also Teflon-- not too much, you don't want to get it all over everything-- and you just brush it onto the threads around it.

You take your fitting.

And when you're tightening, you always go clockwise.

That's why we applied the Teflon tape clockwise.

If we had applied it counterclockwise, the tape would just fall off as you tighten the fitting on.

So now you're going with the Teflon tape as you applied it.

So you just screw it on clockwise.

You get it as tight as you can by hand.

This is a 24 inch rigid pipe wrench, a must-have for every plumber and pipefitter.

We keep them closed so that they don't rattle in the truck.

So we open the pipe wrench so that it will fit around the fitting.

But when you go to turn it, it should grab the fitting because of these ridges on the pipe wrench.

So once we have a positive grab on the fitting, you see that it'll turn.

And we want to tighten it.

This is a standard thread.

There should be about three or four threads showing when you're done tightening it, which is exactly how I applied my Teflon tape to show just a few threads.

We want to tighten it until basically you only see a little bit left of that Teflon tape.

And it's a great workout too.

And that is a water and gas tight joint.

All right, now the cast iron.

A cast iron is used for drainage systems, drainage waste, and vents.

So it is used to bring the waste away from the building to the outside to the sewer system or to the septic system.

Most of the time these days, people are using PVC fittings.

Cast iron was what was used before PVC was most prevalent, but they also use cast iron today because it's silent.

It's the silent pipe.

So if you have a building that's multiple floors and you have bathrooms and kitchens in floors above you, when the drainage in the waste goes down through the pipes through the building, it's silent and you can't hear it.

So in a lot of hotel applications and hospitals and roof drainage, because water flowing from the roof into the pipes is very loud on a stormy day, they'll use cast iron piping.

So it will silence the drainage.

So there's different applications for the cast iron, but we wanted to show you how you cut and secure fittings for cast iron drainage piping.

So first of all, we're going to cut a 32 inch piece.

This is a white marker.

A pencil will work, but it's really hard to see.

And a Sharpie is black, so you can't really see it.

So we like to carry a chalk or a white marker.

So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to measure out 32 inches.

And we're going to make that white mark right there, so it's very easy to see.

My helper, Brandon, is going to hold the other side.

Because when I cut it, the pipe is fairly heavy.

So we want somebody holding it on the other side, so it doesn't just drop.

The cast iron will shatter and break easily if it's smashed on the ground.

And you'll see the cutting method here will prove that.

So this is a very old plumbing tool.

It's a cast iron snapper.

And what it does is you wrap the pipe with the chain, and you put the chain in the slot on this side.

So you line up this little wheel right here on the mark.

You wrap the chain, and then you put the two knobs into the slots and stay on that mark.

So what this does is it will squeeze the pipe so tight that it will snap the pipe.

Pull this pin, you turn this to the right, and it'll loosen.

You pull this pin and turn it this way, and you turn this knob to the left, and it will tighten.

And you know it's tightening because you'll hear it ratchet, so you can listen.

[clicking] So first of all, you need to make sure that the snapper is all the way open.

Otherwise, you're not going to get a tight grip on the chain.

So you need to make sure that you get the chain as tight as possible.

[clicking] So now when I'm tightening it, you'll hear it ratchet.

Keep tightening it until it squeezes the pipe.

[clicking] And once you can tighten it all the way with your hand, the chain has encapsulated the pipe all the way around.

And that's when this lever comes in handy, because what the lever does is it turns this knob for you that your hand can't do anymore.

So you take this lever.

Brandon's going to hold the other side of the pipe.

And you just turn it, and this is squeezing the chain on top of the pipe.

And the little wheels on this chain are pointed and they're sharp, so they're cutting the pipe perfectly.

[clicking] And then you have a perfect cut.

And now we'll talk about the fittings and how you assemble the pipe.

The pipe is assembled with clamps.

We have a rubber coupling.

There's a stop inside of it, just like a copper fitting.

So we make sure that that's all the way on, and you can feel it stop in the pipe.

So now that that's pushed all the way on, we have two fittings here.

This is called an eighth bend.

And the reason why it's called an eighth bend is because it would take eight of these to make a circle.

It's a 45 degree fitting, but we call them eighth bends.

And that would make this a quarter bend.

It would take four of these to make a circle.

So this is a quarter bend and this is an eighth.

We're going to take the eighth bend.

We're going to take our clamp.

We're going to slide our clamp on to the fitting.

We're going to bottom this out just like we did on the pipe.

So you want to run your fingers along the middle of this and make sure there's no bubbling, and make sure that the fitting in the pipe are sitting next to each other perfectly and there's no ridge, and it feels good.

You can spin them.

Spinning them helps line them up.

You take the clamp, and you line up the edges of the clamp with the rubber coupling.

You make sure that the clamp is all lined up and straight.

And then this is called a torque wrench.

It's got a 5/16 tip.

These are 5/16 screws on here that will tighten the clamps.

And this torque wrenches set at 60 pounds of torque, which is what the manufacturer recommends for this clamp.

So you will turn this torque wrench until it snaps.

And when it snaps, that means you have 60 full pounds of torque.

You want to start with the two bands in the middle and get those nice and snug.

Make sure the metal is lining up on the clamp.

And you want to do a cross pattern, where you do one clamp and then you jump to the other side.

And once they're all snug, you can go ahead and torque.

So I start with one of the ones in the middle.

[snap] Did you hear that snap?

That's a torque wrench.

That means that this clamp is set at 60 full pounds of torque.

And I do this one on the edge.

[snap] That one's good.

[snap] That one's good.

[snapping] I can hear them all snap.

So that means that this clamp is all the way secured, 60 pounds of torque on every band clamp.

And this can handle all the drainage and all the waste water and all the stormwater in the world.

Nice solid joint.

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