Pipe threading help.

When I was with High Country Pines Water Company, we kind of were the inspector. There was me and one guy, 50 years my senior, taking care of a system that supplied 800 homes and 4 businesses. 20231211_164109.jpg
This is a failed commercial meter, 40lbs of brass. Just a 2in connection. We had 12in mains.
 
I remember getting a batch of ABS pipe one time that you could not put enough glue on it to fill the gap.
Pipe threads so rough you knew it was not going to work on some iron pipe.
 
Was it pipe or tube size? There's a difference, and some are stupidly close but no cigar. We did a job on a bunch of 6" stainless on an outage once, where we fabbed up the pieces and then went to install them on the shutdown. We go to fit the pipes up and discovered, much to our horror, that the pipes were really 6" tube size. So much fun cutting pipe into reducers on the fly, and then all the extra welding.
 
That would seriously suck.
No, just 3" not being 3" on the plastic. I don't care what they labeled it. The OD was about a 1/8th lacking over all. SO like a 1/16th gap all the way round. Bad.
Threads on iron most likely due to just not wanting to change the die or just too much taper.
 
And now you see why i prefer to cut my own nipples, at least i know the threads are good then, and why i bother doing the tape and dope. The good news is that if your water is hard enough it'll repair itself! I've actually heard of guys wrapping a leaking screwed joint with a rag full of rock salt so it'll rust shut :lol: usually just to limp something along til they can get to it, on non critical stuff, usually :/: :D.
 
Back in the day, my first "real" job was in a plumbing shop. Started at 15.
My grandfather worked in the Getty Oil fields as carpenter and pipe fitter. Always had tons of pipe and fittings in the barn to plumb tree houses and certain appreciated by grandma and bothersome to grandpa, irrigation projects in the orange orchard, barn and garden. My childhood.
My Step father was a plumber for the shop I worked for at 15. He was there over 40 years. Shop was started in So Cal back in the 20s or 30s I guess. Next door neighbor was one of the bosses and his 3 sons and a daughter worked there.. they were some what related by marriage.
One of my main jobs on the weekend was taking all the cut pipe the plumbers brought back and filling cut lists for prefab set ups and making threads on sections of pipe. Making nipples as it were. Chop saw and thread the cut list and load it on the truck along with the necessary fittings and pipe sizes amd lengths.
Over stock on my threaded stock was my other job to "push it" onto the plumbers.
At least they could cut it to the size they needed rather than cutting up a full 21' stick. Guys were a little pissy about it. Damn kid making part of the truck bed scrap they brought back previous. But hey, a lot of pipe got used where it may have just been scrap.
 
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I think this truck of theirs was still in the yard when I worked there. In fact, a couple of them. My dads truck was a 56 GMC I believe. They eventually went newer for him. My uncle John worked there too. They made their own truck bed set ups in the shop out of wood and steel. Complete with a slide out pipe cutter, pipe racks and fitting bins. This truck was eventually restored by my dads recollection.
Many a summer afternoon, after my paper route, I would stop by Joe Mason's garage (one of the owners) where he would be building an airplane. Got to watch afew get built over the years. Wood frame wonders.
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Do you use hemp rope (strands teased out and wrapped around the male pipe threads) and plumbers paste (linseed oil based paste) on threaded joins over there ?

used to be the way things were done till tape and teflon based paste became the norm.
Fine for water/ oil / steam threaded joins, on galv pipe or cast iron the paste ensured that they would come apart years later not rusted/ welded together.

Takes a bit more time, but if you have a join that wont seal any other way, hemp will.


sealing1.jpg sealing3.jpg sealing4.5.jpg sealing4.jpg
 
I prefer the teflon tape, but I used the hemp fibers in two cases: when there are some external forces risking to displace/move the pieces (teflon is too slippery, even with a strong tightening), and when I had to mary the old threaded 2"steel pipes and the new brass fittings; there was so much play that the teflon couldn't fill it. Domestic use here, for my old central heater system, around 1930, designed to work by thermosiphon. Now it has a pump, but the old pipes are still there, waiting for a complete rebuild, one day...
 
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Started messing with the pipe threader tonight. It's turning into a bit of a project in itself. This is the actual threading die, not the powered threader, which is definitely a project. I got my pipe vise down in the basement, so at least I can do the four nipples I need by hand.

My plumber friend said when he started, the year I was born, he would hand thread all the pipes for the tank, including the legs, and all the big pipes on the boiler. Buying pre threaded nipples was not the norm. He said you knew you'd done something after you installed a tank.

20231231_180813.jpg 20231231_182841.jpg
 
Oh i like to cut my own nipples, but you need the tools to do so, and as a fitter many contractors would rather simply buy them because time is money and having a nipple tray with rows of nipples in 1/2" increments is rather convenient. And by nipples on threaded i mean less than 6" long, everything else is called pipe, when it's welded the short ones are called pups. When cutting nipples less than 6" holding them becomes an issue, especially in a power threader, so you need a nipple chuck. They sell them but most contractors don't have them, so we make our own, they aren't hard to make but are kinda finicky to get right. I've even worked in fab shops where they had full on production machines for doing threaded pipe, complete with machines for spinning fittings on, so most jobs could be done with minimal on site work, just putting the pieces in rather than threading everything right there.
 
The last I hand threaded was a piece of 2 inch for an exhaust on an Oliver crawler using a combination die .I had to use a three foot cheater bar to crank down the die .75 years old and 40 pounds light makes a difference . As far as plumbing pipe it goes like this .Righty tighty ,lefty loosey .Tight is tight too tight is broken . I've got the dies,Rigid from 1/8" to two inch ,pipe vise and oiler tub .Plus the pipe wrenchs from a tiny little 6 inch up to 36 inch Very seldom use any of them . .
 
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