191–200 of 270 posts
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When I was a kid, my mom's theory on pencil purchasing was that if she bought enough, the house would be so saturated that you could shake a curtain and a pencil would fall out.
Hum... Clearly, I'm not alone. That's at least some comfort.
In case anyone from the US reads this, BSPP and BSPT fittings are rare and incredibly frustrating here, as our NPT (National Pipe Taper) threads are different and the selection of BSP(P/T) fittings is extremely poor in comparison. Also, I work with NPT fittings quite a lot: > For what it’s worth, I tightly wrap the tape 10 times round the male thread and get an enraged mountain gorilla to tighten it up. This is a WTF…
Pipe dope FTW.
I had to learn the arcane world of pipe fitting sizes working with pneumatics for a scuba equipment project. It is extremely confusing. Unfortunately, it can have fatal consequences. In a recent story, a scuba store employee used the wrong size fitting on a 3,000 psi scuba tank which shot out and killed them. Seeing that American can't even adopt the metric system, I have little hope for a clear international standar…
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Hum... Clearly, I'm not alone. That's at least some comfort.
Almost every night I pick up 3-5 pencils around the main living area at our house. Somehow there are always dozens of pencils around, but finding one with a working eraser on the end is as rare as finding a unicorn.
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https://etymology.en-academic.com/27822/plumber https://etymology.en-academic.com/27820/plumb It appears you are wrong, and the person you are replying to was correct. Perhaps when baldly contradicting someone, you could make some effort to back up your opinion.
The first 2 meanings of plumb from the site you link is: https://etymology.en-academic.com/27820/plumb plumb plumb {{11}}plumb (adj.) "perpendicular, vertical," mid-15c., from PLUMB (Cf. plumb) (n.). The notion of "exact measurement" led to extended sense of "completely, downright" (1748), sometimes spelled plump or plunk. {{12}}plumb (n.) c.1300, "lead hung on a string to show the vertical line," from O.Fr. plombe,…
I suspect that plunging in and making a poor argument doesn't reflect well upon you. I am happy to be corrected, if you can provide a rock-solid reference: the English language is a wonderful midden.
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"You need about 1.5 wraps of PTFE tape to seal a fitting. Any more is wasteful and asking for leaks" I would have thought this obvious and it's essentially my experience (and I'm definitely not a plumber). However, I've found that more PTFE tape is needed on old or worn fittings or on ones that have damaged or badly cut threads—or when mating same sized pipes/fittings but each with different threads (yes, that's a de…
>Of course—not being plumber—it often happens that when I urgently need PTFE tape I cannot find it Ahh, young padawan, the way of the elder is to buy a roll every time you have a project to do until you have achieved saturation...where there is a lightly used roll of teflon tape in every drawer and on every surface of your workshop and garage.
Also on my list of buy too many so I’m never left without: sharpies, microfiber cloths, jumper cables, rice (carbs), frozen sliced sourdough (fancy carbs), pocketable protein/energy bars.
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https://etymology.en-academic.com/27822/plumber https://etymology.en-academic.com/27820/plumb It appears you are wrong, and the person you are replying to was correct. Perhaps when baldly contradicting someone, you could make some effort to back up your opinion.
The first 2 meanings of plumb from the site you link is: https://etymology.en-academic.com/27820/plumb plumb plumb {{11}}plumb (adj.) "perpendicular, vertical," mid-15c., from PLUMB (Cf. plumb) (n.). The notion of "exact measurement" led to extended sense of "completely, downright" (1748), sometimes spelled plump or plunk. {{12}}plumb (n.) c.1300, "lead hung on a string to show the vertical line," from O.Fr. plombe,…
> late 14c. (from c. 1100 as a surname), "a worker in any sort of lead" (roofs, gutters, pipes), from Old French plomier "lead-smelter" (Modern French plombier) and directly from Latin plumbarius "worker in lead," noun use of adjective meaning "pertaining to lead," from plumbum "lead" (see plumb (n.)). The meaning focused 19c. on "workman who installs pipes and fittings" as lead pipes for conveying water and gas became the principal concern of the trade.
We can read Vitruvius' description of chorobates at https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Vitruvius... (Note that https://ethw.org/Roman_Aqueducts claims "the credit given to this instrument by Vitruvius was out of proportion to its real usefulness.")
> The chorobates is a rod about •twenty feet in length, having two legs at its extremities of equal length and dimensions, and fastened to the ends of the rod at right angles with it; between the rod and the legs are cross pieces fastened with tenons, whereon vertical lines are correctly marked, through which correspondent plumb lines hang down from the rod. When the rod is set, these will coincide with the lines marked, and shew that the instrument stands level.
The Latin for "plumb lines" is seen in "quae habent lineas ad perpendiculum recte descriptas pendentiaque ex regula perpendicula in singulis partibus" - Vitruvius does not use a variation of "plumb" to describe those verticals.
That usage, from the quoted etymology, wasn't created for another 1,000+ years.
I could be wrong of course, but the evidence I've seen doesn't support your claim at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33765351 .
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If you want a really good seal you wrap the tape 1-2 overlaps at the start of the thread and progressively make it thicker and thicker so you have more overlaps (10x) at the base. I guess it depends on the fittings but some run out of tapper and you can't tighten it anymore without the hexagonal nut hitting the adjacent fitting. This works well as you're building your own tapper which is sort of acting as an o-ring.…
Do you have a reference for this? Everything I've read is the purpose of the tape is to reduce friction (hence PTFE), not to actually seal. In other words, the seal comes from the fittings connecting tightly, made possible by 2-3 wraps of PTFE low friction tape.
Taper threads are designed to crush together to achieve something similar, but for what's available at the hardware store I've always had problems.
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My own working model is one of complexity building up over time. You can handle it fine as long as you don't have many fields of endeavor, you have plenty of time to periodically focus on them, keep the stuff organized, can fully finish a project and button it up, etc. But then things happen where you're forced to clear out your mental cache, or even screw up your organization/storage system for whatever, and it come…
Right, that makes sense. And my explanation is more complex than I could detail in my comment. I know I have too many diverse interests—fields of endeavor to quote you—and the older I get the more of them I accumulate. On the one hand having many interests is very useful because it allows me to see and understand common ideas or threads across quite disparate and diverse subjects that otherwise would not have been ob…
For when you want to have a pipe-to-pipe adapter to hang a radio on a tower, or wall mount it on top of a building mechanical penthouse or similar.