Love it, thanks Vance. BTW I nearly tore my hair out bending the fat SS tubing that connects the MBTs to the valves on the conning tower, and went through about 40 feet of the stuff. I bought a pipe bender that was the big brother of the one I use for the small gauge tubing, but it turned out to be a pipe kinker, infallible at putting kinks and creases in the tubing. I tried filling the tubing with sand, no luck. In the end, what worked was bending it with bare hands over a SCUBA tank!
Alec,
Don't know if you're onto this trick, but when you get ready to re-plumb the high pressure air (as mentioned in the caption of one of those photos), we used to bend a template set out of 1/8" aluminum tig rod before committing to the stainless (which is very unforgiving, especially in small pieces, as you have already discovered). You can get your lengths and angle changes right to a gnat's hair with the rod, and do it on the cheap. Go centerline to centerline of your fittings, cutting to the depth required for your Swagelok fit-up, but remember to add/subtract an additional 1/8" to the tubing for arcs in stainless. Try it with a chunk of copper tube, if you like, but doing it before you do it for real is a definite improvement over the sweating and grunting while sitting in the sub. You'll get exactly what you need in stainless without wasting the HP tubing in the process, and you can build the whole thing on the bench--and it will fit like the proverbial champ.
Vance
-----Original Message-----
From: Smyth, Alec < Alec.Smyth@compuware.com>
To: personal_submersibles < personal_submersibles@psubs.org>
Sent: Sat, Oct 8, 2011 8:05 pm
Subject: [PSUBS-MAILIST] Snoopy updates
Yesterday I finally got to dive Snoopy extensively with all her new mods, and they worked like a charm. Therefore I thought I'd share...
<CPWRsig_04_11-03-2010.jpg>
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