Steam Powered Potato Pistol 1.0

Step 2 Sweat those pipes

Sweating pipes is soldering. Sweat the whole assembly together. This part took the longest for me because I have limited plumbing skills. One of my fittings took eight tries before I finally got an air tight seal. The key here is to make the joints completely air/water tight like real plumbing. After soldering, cool the barrel and blow into it with your mouth; there should be should be absolutely no air hissing sounds.

Gdawg at Instructables has a nice tutorial on How to Sweat (solder) Copper Pipe

Comments

[dfuller1]

Nice Instructible! I love this kind of project and may have to try this with my son.
One tip for sweat soldering: (I certainly don't do this every day, but several times a year for the last 20 years or so). I finally gave up on using the tiny brushes for the flux and just use my finger to spread it onto the joint before soldering. I seem to get a lot more consistent results that way.