Brazing v.s. Soft Solder

okay so you can see the difference here we have the stay bright number eight with the state clean flux here we have the regular Dynaflow foss copper sticks with nitrogen parish without nitrogen purge and your forty five percent silver solder with state civil flux on a copper to steel joint hello and welcome back to the shop and this video is beginning a video that one out and that's gonna be all about brazing versus soft soldering when you shouldn't use both how I use them and everything else so before we get into that I just want to thank everybody that wish me a happy birthday last week on Facebook I think I thanked all you guys in the post but I may have missed somebody here in there so I just want to say thank you and like I said we're doing soldering and brazing now this is all gonna be my experience other people's experience may be differently some people may disagree with what I'm telling you which is perfectly fine I've been working in this trade in refrigeration trade for 16 years now pretty much since I was 16 years old I'm 32 now so I've been doing this for 16 years and I've been working for my company for 15 years so this is going off all my experience now what I work on is like commercial units so walk-in coolers usually restaurants and stuff like that walk-in coolers walked in freezers rooftop units usually up to 20 25 tons reaching coolers reach-in freezes that sort of thing we also do have units and have installed units that are for 10a which is the newer refrigerant as since replaced I 22 since they developed the EPA phase-out and that's it so what we're gonna do is we're gonna break this down to a few seconds and the first thing we're just going to talk is just the copper and then we'll talk about the action well first we'll talk about the products then we'll talk about the actual tubing and joint prep and things like that and we'll go through we're gonna soft sorry using the softs are going to show you we're gonna braise using both a floss copper state and also 45 percent silver which is known as silver soldering more than silver brazing kind of interchangeable on that type what to do what not to do and things like that so let's I women on the bench here and we'll go through the three different products that we're gonna use to join spike okay so first we're gonna kind of focus on the soft sawdust and these are the two that I use and like I said everything here is Harris branded products and this is Bridget soft solder and stay bright number eight the number eight is important and I'll show you this Bridget stuff I use this on drain lines and water fittings like if I need to connect a nice machine to the water line or or whatever sawed off laying it on for a water line for a nice machine this is a starter that will be used and the reason for that the the main reason for that is that this sauna here is a lot cheaper than this tape right solder and the reason is is this contains silver silver bearing solder as you can rewrite that now there is a huge debate on whether soft solder should be used in refrigeration equipment or not okay I'm here to tell you that it can be used if you use this product and I'm not being a shill for Harris products it's just I I really really like this saw them and I haven't had an issue with it and I have with some other ones in the past on refrigeration of what so now what this is is silver bearing solder now there's two state rights stay bright label products that Harris puts out one of them is just called stay bright and then there's another one called stay bright number eight and the main difference between them is the amount of silver contest and I have the spec sheets printed out right here it came prepared for class so state right just the state right not the number eight has three point four to three point eight percent silver and the rest is Tim state bright number eight has five and a half to six percent silver and the rest is Tim and the biggest difference between them is the melting point stay bright just the plain old stay bright has a solid and liquid melting point of four hundred and thirty degrees meaning that it melts into it into a really nice liquid form at at four hundred thirty degrees it has a permanent melting point well stay bright number eight here has a temperature range so the solid form of it which means is four hundred thirty degrees so will start to melt at four hundred thirty degrees and won't become completely liquid until five hundred and thirty five degrees so what that means is is you can feather your flame and get this to bridge a gap on a loose-fitting pipe now the downfall with this is that in which is why I think personally that brazing is used more in the refrigeration in the refrigeration setting the downfall with this is you have to clean your pipes so you have to clean your fittings with a wire brush you have to clean the outside of your pipe with the sand cloth and you have to use a flux and this is an acid based resin flux it's a paste okay now you'll hear people say never use flux in the system it'll get in the system in or ruin it you have to use a shitload of flux to do that you'll see the amount that I'm going to be putting on these joints it's not going to get into the system and it's not gonna cause a problem unless you really glop it in there and I'll show you one of the biggest mistakes that people make with using flux and how it can get into the system now the other thing is you'll hear people say yeah you can use soft solder but you can only use it on the suction line which is the low pressure side of the system which let's say on a normal our 22 air-conditioner your suction pressures around 70 68 70 psi on a 410 a system I think it's dr. top my head it's 100 and some 120 540 something like that I can't remember not looking at the PT shot right my hand but somewhere around there okay you discharged now your high side your liquid line will be on a normal 22 will be about two and a quarter to 250 and your 410 a will probably will be running up in the threes somewhere okay now you just look in to see what the alright so we have a tensile strength on state right a 14,000 psi and a shear strength of 10,000 psi okay so we're not going to pop a joint as far as psi goes the other thing that you'll hear people say is well maybe you can use it on the liquid line but guess what you can't use it on the discharge line of the compressor which is the line coming right out of the compressor which it gets hot as hell and you can you can really burn yourself off it well I'm here to tell you that you can because look at your compressors manufacturing specs okay Copeland off the top my head even says in their manuals and everything else that the discharge line of a compressor should not get above 225 degrees not to say that it never does they can with either something wrong with the system low charge things like that it can be above that but they say that normal operating pressures operating temperature is 225 degrees okay so let's even up that to 300 degrees okay we're having a bad day with the compressor so 300 degrees in my opinion you'll be cooking your compressor way before you fail a joint this starts to melt at 430 degrees so we're still 130 degrees off from melting the solder now everybody also say some people say a vibration plays a part in that that can make it can make the the it can wreck the joint from vibration and the joint will the the solder will break it won't everything in the refrigeration system vibrates does vibration dampeners in the system the compressors on little rubber feet to take most of the vibration out of the system if you have a bigger thing compressive like a like a semi that things on Springs floating around there and that usually has the vibration eliminated and everything else vibration isn't gonna affect this I personally I mean I've seen this leak before but I've also seen braze joints leak before and usually it's a it's an issue of the actual bonding of the metal or a joint issue it has nothing to do with the solder itself being weakened and where this really really shines is doing sensitive parts I don't happen to have one down here with me but I have a doing sensitive parts like valves and reversing valves and expansion valves you can kill these if you put too much heat and into them and you have to put a lot of heat to braise these and then you know you have to wrap it around like crazy with towels and everything else to keep it cool but you're only heating these two joints here to 400 degrees and instead of 1500 degrees by using soft solder so this is a very very good product and it has a lot of benefits and not much detriment I mean I think like I said that the reason why people braze is because you don't need to clean there's no joint prep you just put the pipe together braze it people think that they're saving time people don't like to clean clean the copper but I'll be honest with you even when I praise they clean the copper but that that's besides the fact but I think that that that's the biggest thing as to why people shy away from this but like I said I I have never had an issue with it we're gonna show you a bunch of benefits for this without much detriment to it okay so the next item up for bids here is Harris Dynaflow of FOSS copper sticks and this is the typical brazing rod now I use the regular Faust copper ones because they're cheaper they have up to 15 percent silver bearing brazing rod and they get quite expensive as to compare with this but if you actually look up the the specs on it you can see that this is about six six percent silver and the other one like it says fifteen fifteen percent silver but the temperature melting points are pretty much the same and tensile strength and everything else is pretty much the same and for this it starts to melt at eleven hundred and ninety degrees and it becomes completely liquid at fourteen hundred and seventy-three so starts to melt 1200 degrees and turns completely liquid to at 1500 degrees now there's the biggest problem is just the heat involved and with that what happens is is when you heat the copper up that high it does two things one beneficial thing and one not so beneficial thing the beneficial thing is that the heat will actually clean the pipe it'll actually burn all the impurities out of it and this stuff stuff is self fluxing requires no flux that bad thing that happens is as soon as you pull that torch away that copper immediately oxidizes it immediately gets this flaky skin on it now that's happening on the outside of the pot but it's also happening on the inside of the pot and we don't want any of that garbage in our refrigeration system so to use this properly you have to flow nitrogen through your pipe to displace the oxygen in the air in the pipe and to prevent that scale from building up on the inside now not a lot of people do that some people do some people don't but I'm telling telling you right now I have a lot a lot of places law lotta calls in people don't do that and you can see kind of here's an instance of a place where they didn't do that and you can see the oxidization on the inside of that pipe as compared to something like this and then it's not really a good example you might not be able to see it and they see all the crud in that compared to this one right and we'll show an example of that now where this stuff that shine is obviously if you have a previously braze joint and you need to fix a leak you would need to use this also say you're on sweating a compressor and just wanted to sweat the compressor back in you're gonna unbrace the joy heat it up and pull the pipe out and then rephrase it back in but whether I particularly find this useful is bridging gaps now where you gonna find gaps in pipe well I've noticed that sometimes you get really really crappy fittings and loose fitting fittings and usually that's on the back of an evaporator coil with a suction and liquid line comes in like if you replacing the coil for some reason those sweat joints are just slightly slightly too big in this and the pipe likes to float in it so what I like to do is braze that one joint in soft sort of the rest also usually sometimes sometimes the the copper p-traps the preform p-traps sometimes those fittings on the end there there is slightly oversized I don't know it's just a manufacturer thing I mean everything's made in China so that could be it but the other place that you're gonna find gaps where I use this a lot is drain lines walk-in freezers things like that have a drain line and that drain line is wrapped with a heat tape sometimes the heat tape fails or sometimes you get a clog down the drain and it backs up and it freezes and it bursts the pipe well sometimes things are so tight in a walk-in because you have 9000 racks everywhere it's hard to get at the pipe to be able to cut cut a piece out kind of cut a piece out make a new piece put two couplings in solder it back into place so what you can actually do is squeeze it back down and you'll have that little crack and you can actually just braze right over it and the good thing about that too is that's going to be the weakest point of the pipe so if it ever does freeze up again it's going to burst your braze joint usually won't burst the pipe down someplace done line now we'll show examples of bridging a gap with this and how we need to use the nitrogen and everything else now the last piece here and it comes in a roll and this is just a piece here and you can see it has a gold tinge to it and this is silver solder even though it is raising it melts that roughly the same temperature as these foster coppers dish but this needs flux even though it is a braise it needs flux and this is going to be that white paste flux all right and you can see this bottles ancient because I hardly ever use this now when you need to use this 45% silver stuff is when you're connecting copper to steel or steel of Steel where you gonna find that refrigeration system well you're gonna find that on most service valves that both bolt onto the compressor that I've always called these rotor lock fittings but I'm pretty sure that's a proprietary name for Copeland's little fittings that go on that but they there's a threaded little boss on the compressor these guys screw on there and you can see it's all steel and you have to put a piece of copper in there so you have to use the silver solder to connect that joint that's the only thing that will join copper to steel now here's the thing why I called PS on people saying that this flux ruins a system well this is also flux this is acid based and this you have to use when connecting this using the 45 percent silver rod so what is the difference between using this in the system which was perfectly because accepted and acknowledged as the only way to do it to using this on the system I don't I don't see a difference so we'll show how to connect those up and we'll go through all this and show some of the benefits and detriments as we go now what I want to talk to talk about real quick is the actual tubing now there are three types of tubing k l and m m is thinner walled plumbing tubing L is or a CR tubing and commonly called them referred to as that that is the tubing that we use in the refrigeration trade and that is the thicker walled and it's also nitrogen charged it has a nitrogen holding charge in there if you buy it in a 20 foot length usually usually if you buy a 10 foot length is a 20 foot length that's cut in half also that copper is made without any kind of release agent on when it's drawn through so there's no wax there's no powder or anything in there there's no contaminants as a clean piece of pipe and the show and then there's K tubing is really thick walled stuff for special applications probably won't run into that but just to show you a little bit of the difference here you can see the wall on that compared to of course the piece is too thick to get it up to the camera if you guys can see the difference in the wall thickness of this M type tubing compared to the L here now another thing when I'm talking sizes I'm talking a CR sizes okay so my sizes are not plumbing sizes plumbers go by the inside diameter pipe refrigeration guys go by the outside diameter pipe because we got to be different so this here is good old half inch plumbers pipe type oh right my half inch is that okay that's my quarter inch that's my 3/8 that's my half-inch that's my 5/8 that's my 3/4 and that's my 7/8 okay so when I'm talking sizes I'm talking this now quick word about fittings there are two types of fittings two types of 90s not just Street and regular which here's the street ninety which has one sweat side one not so you can hook it into another switch point here's a regular ninety but you have long sweep in short sweet so here's a long sweet and here's your short sweet for refrigeration always use a long sweep granted there are some places where you have to use a shorts we'd be getting in a crazy tight spot but where possible always use a long sweep couplings there it is a difference between couplings this is a plumbing coupling this is a refrigeration coupling now I know a lot of big-box stores are starting to stock all this stuff and is actually starting to stock L tubing but you can see the difference here you see I have a line here that would separate the two ends of the pipe and not allow the pipe to push through all right so that's what stops it and you can see in there you see that little bubble so the the pipe ends hit that whole ridge inside the plumbing coupling the only thing stopping the pipe from sliding all the way through just these little and nets here alright that's not that's just a mark this this little indent here in this one here that's actually paint so that's the only thing holding and you can't you can kinda see it down in there that's the only thing holding you from pushing the pipe all the way through this fitting is actually kind of filthy most of these fittings and pieces these pieces of pipe are just cut offs off of my extras I usually keep little short sections like this in the truck for drain lines and things like that on onions number so most of this copper that you're gonna be seeing here is kind of dirty and not anything that I would be using on an actual system most most of my pipe in my truck it's all carried in a the longer lengths are carried in a tubing rack in there they're capped on both ends but these are just short little pieces that have been kicking around in my bag and everything else okay so now to get to one of my pet peeves when you're connecting pipe and tubing for the love of God by a fitting since you can build it since you can bridge a gap with this stuff what I see a lot of is you know somebody taking a piece of quarter-inch a piece of 3/8 like this and sleeving it over and like an ass taking the pair of lineman's and crimping the sucker down to fit you know doing one of those jobs there and then braising that and using that as that connection I know a lot of you saying no they don't do that oh god yeah they do if you look on my Facebook page I crap a lot of pictures of people doing that that is my oh this is just the worst the only place that that is anywhere near acceptable this here museum you hope this is a pencil drive capped tube dryer alright this is capped tube here you can see how small it is right well when you put it in here that tubing here is way bigger than the cap too so you have to crimp and neither braze or soft side of that that's acceptable because you have no other choice there's no fitting that it's going to reduce down to a cap tube also the same thing when usually when this event ended in evaporator use a little tab of like 3/8 copper of this here that you have to put it in in crimp embrace you have no choice of doing that that's fine but to do it like this they make reduces by the reducer all right so let's me set up a couple of pieces over here that we're going to actually connect and we'll do soft solder first and then we'll do brazing and then we'll do the silver soldering and you can see three differences where they're gonna braise two different joints on the brazing rod with and without nitrogen so you can see the difference in that and I'll show you the setups I use for brazing okay first things first let's talk about how to get the part cotton off the saw okay so these are pretty much my basic equipment that I use what we have is a map gas tank with a this is a turbo torch TX 504 head and this is a dual fuel head you can use this on map gas and propane that gas is more expensive but it does burn a little bit hotter so it was pretty much what I use and it's self-igniting you can adjust it also in the same main this is a burn somatic one it's a little older I've found that the burn somatic one I actually have to change the striker inside this it doesn't auto-ignite anymore but this one actually burns a little hotter than the turbo torch version but they both work equally well now you can braise with these you can braise probably up to maybe 1/2 inch maybe even 5/8 copper anything over that it's really struggling and you want something a little bit bigger like this and this is a turbo torch it's made by fictive technologies it's hooked up to a B tank they also make a smaller tank and M tank which is small on this these tanks are really there this ones that means I don't know the weight is on this maybe 30 pounds although maybe more but it's light enough to be able to carry on a roof with you now yeah bogged enough to get a decent amount of use out of the M tanks I've tried them I just don't like the longevity of the gas how long the tanks actually last and what this is is an air acetylene torch so just like these guys here our air and map gas this air in a settlement okay so there's no extra tank for oxy-acetylene drink or anything like that and what you have are different size tips and these are two of the most common ones that I use here okay this one here is this one you see here is a number 11 and this guy here is a number 32 and the number 11 is good for soft saw it's rated for soft solder from one inch to two inches in brazing 7/8 to inch and a half this big guy here is rated for soft solder four to six inches and brazing inch and a half to four inch now this is the smallest tip I own and I use this for everything I've raised three eighths with this a breeze happened to appraise everything with this and it works perfectly fine you just have to you know adjust the heat level pull it off another way that these work is you can see get a little quick enough quick connect coupling on here and they snap right into place you haven't regulated here but you want to run these full open you want to run them all the way open all the time same thing with this little regulator here you want this cranked in all the time you can see it up here just buried you want these things screaming they're loud but they're good I use these for soft soldering when I can't get the whole map gas tank in there so if I'm working on like a lowboy reaching I gotta crawl in the unit these work really good and that's the only time that I throttle down the flame on these is with the soft soldering if you throw a little down too much you'll see that blue flame start to inch into inside the pipe here inside the actual tip of the torch and the tip of the torch will get super hot start going red you want that nice little rose but flame you want that out away from the tip of the torch there and like I said these work really really good and they have much smaller sizes and I think this is one of the law just not sure they go much larger than this anything like this you probably want I mean if he tried to bring something that's over four inches probably in a one oxygeddon triggers something like that anyway because this does suck down some gas when you're using it and those the basic equipment did I use the soft sauna now they do make a leave as burn somatic makes a one version of this it's not self starting but it has the regulator that screws right into the top of the map gas tank and you have a hose with a wand so you get into tighter areas I tried it out and it works fine I just didn't like the self starting feature I just like pressing the trigger and having to light up so what we're gonna do first is we're gonna soft solder I'm gonna show you the process of going through that soft solder and what we come out with as a joint okay so we're going to connect these two pieces of 7/8 pipe here with a coupling now we're using soft solder and a flux but we need to clean the pipe and the way we do that is using some sand screen now you don't want to use sand cloth with stuff this looks like regular Emery cloth like a strip of sandpaper now reason why is that's way more friable than this stuff is and that kind of sand stuffs tends to go down the pipe this stays intact a lot more and it doesn't get nearly as much garbage in the pipe and if he careful you won't get anything in there so what you want to do is one of the ways that we pretty much minimize and eliminate that is when you stand these sand it to an angle down don't stand it up like this and have any the crap on the pipe and we only need enough cleaned to cover the coupling and maybe about a 1/8 inch or so so when you look at it you want basically the width of this piece of sand cloth sanded this is how would i but I usually go by and you this way to do it is just to grab the pipe in its twist your hand around it takes two seconds doesn't nag up so you need now that stuff you get to skip or this stuff here you get the skips if you're braze it but you can see it doesn't that much time to clean up a nasty-looking piece of pipe to get ready to solder now this is a coupling we need the inside of this clean but also what you want to do is give the outside of it a quick clean around the edge here around the perimeter and go just a little bit around the front edge why do you want to do that well that helps you out in that days that you have too much coffee and you a little shaky with the solder if you hit the stiff side if it's clean you it'll roll into the joint and gets sucked in if it's dirty and you hit the outside of the pipe by accident it's just going to roll off so it just helps a little bit and then take your brush and just do the inside quick little twist on both sides until it's clean and there you go you can see the inside of that is nice and clean so now we want to apply the flux now here's where people's grew up and where I think the idea that flux contamination in the system flux contaminates the system what you want to do only flux the actual tubing the outside of the tubing and that's it and you don't need that much you don't need to go op it on all you need is a slim coat slim skim coat you're barely even perceptible that's all you need that's it if you have any gloves at all when I see a lot of people do is they'll take it out let me let me bury this and screw it back in so here's your flux they'll pop it out you see that big glob on there let's start going at it stop putting the flux on there and get something looking like that no need for that let me grab a rag actually so I just made sure that I got all that cleaned off so you don't even need that much on the brush you don't need to load the brush at all all you need is a nice little coat on the brush and a nice little skim coat on your pipe and now you don't want to go over the edge and the biggest thing that see a lot of people doing and plumbers do this a lot and I mean to pick on plumbers but I've seen a lot of plumbers do this is they'll take the brush and the flux the fitting also don't do that because then you will get the flux in the system and now when you put it together pop it in place there pop it in place here you can see you got a little Ridge of flux that got squeezed out perfectly fine when you heat that up that'll melt right over it and give you a nice little area for that solder to hit so it's gonna put this in the vise to stabilize it now the other thing that you're gonna want to do yourself a favor and get yourself a wet cloth well what's the wet cloth law again taking on plumbers I know a lot of plumbers SC not every point that I've ever seen but a lot of points we'll solder and before the solder is hard they'll take the wet cloth and wipe it and smear the solder you don't want to do that your biggest enemy in refrigeration is moisture you don't want any moisture contamination in the pipe so you don't want to wipe down the pipe when that solder is in liquid form what you want to do is let the pipe cool let that heart not give it a minute or so and then wipe it down you want to get this flux off when you're done the reason being if you leave that flux on here it'll start to oxidize the copper pipe and turn it green so you want that off so when you use the solder easiest way don't use it straight like this grab about a 6 6 inch piece 5 6 inch piece bend it down like that make like an L with it and this will allow you to get the top and underneath really easy without having your hand up underneath like this and getting a saw to drip on it and when you heat the pipe what you want to do which is another thing that I see a lot of people screwing up on you don't want to heat the joint in other words I'm gonna zoom in here what you don't want to do is you don't want you flame just right here you want your flame on the coupling you don't you want to heat the fitting and not the joint the reason being is you get this heat heat it up enough to where melts the solder when you touch the solder here capillary action will whip this solder into place and you'll see that when I will be able to look down the pipe it doesn't take much heat and much time to get this to melt first you'll see this does flux dr. melt and you'll see me touch the solder and then that's it and keep from the ball the way the heat rises around the clock [Music] you see just out of milk not about the Harlem one joints done that's it that's all you need for the solder and just double check all the way around if you need to add a little bit more in the corners do that well we're good that's all you need sometimes it might think you out because the flux may take some of the oxidative oxidization off the copper cleaning the copper for the for the flux and it may pop a black spot in it but that's also where the rat comes in when you clean it off you'll be able to tell what's just a black spot and what's an actual gap so I can tell right now we're completely cooled or we're completely solid all the way around [Music] and they go and that's it I've used a little bit more water than usual just so I can handle this directly after then you can see there's the join there's the bottom of the join you can see the little little nubs on the bottom that's perfectly normal and fun you can see the top is nice all the way around and we'll get a better close-up of these on the bench okay now let me just zooming out here a little toasty so you can see we didn't damage anything with the pipe we didn't discolor anything and also the tempering is still we didn't we didn't soften the pipe so we didn't anneal the pipe at all you can see I'm trying to bend it now you can see it's still nice and solid now what we're gonna do now is we're going to take probably a small piece probably a piece of 3/4 and we're going to braise it I'm gonna braise it twice we're gonna braise it with a nitrogen purge and without a nitrogen purge and see what happens okay so we're actually gonna use a piece of 7/8 and a ninety so I'm just trying to use up some of the crappy fittings that I had in the truck and you know junk copper without having to cut a new piece or use a nice new new fitting I don't have any other 7/8 kind of trashy couplings so we're gonna use a nine now you can see how dirty that is that's dirty copper that's dirtier than usual me personally even though I'm brazing I still would give this a quick clean it takes you two seconds and let me tell you it makes it joints look I have a lot better now you can see I have the 90 here and I push in with all my strength and I can't bend that 90 all right I can't collapse it so what we're gonna do is we're gonna add this into the vise here so I should probably do is this way turn it away you can see it and we're gonna zoom in here a bit okay so now now we're gonna braise this then we're going to be using our lost copper sticks here now we don't have to clean it which is what you're gonna see with the flame is he going to see wherever I put the flame you're gonna see a clean spot kind of up here and now there is no nitrogen purge in this and I'm gonna show you what happens when you don't put a nitrogen to it so you can see wherever I have the flame you're gonna see a nice clean spot happening now here's the thing you have to get this red-hot for this to flow if you don't get this superhot and touch it what will happen is is it'll flow into the fitting perfectly fine in attach itself to the copper but it won't flow all the way around so a lot of times what you have to do I'm like you saw it with the soft side where I could just touch the top and it flowed right around you may have to drag this around a little bit around the fitting to make sure you have it all especially on the bottom it tends to not want to want to stick way yet or on the bottom if you don't have it hard enough just by gravity so you need to make sure that you either get this hard enough so that this flow is really nice which you would have to get this super hot like be on red-hot or you can tell when it starts to melt you can follow that joint all the way around with the stick it's a little more involved process so I'm going to be using the number 11 tip here and now we're gonna light this up I'm gonna get going [Music] go it down you can see how that comes back into this novel now this whole dog is getting hot [Music] sometimes you have to lock it all around we got a nice and warmed up [Music] on the carpet so you even I think it's burning all the impurities off the device you can use it on really dirty cop [Music] we've tried to get red-hot because Helena [Music] and this stuff heads that want to follow away put in the flame [Music] [Music] okay you can see that tweaked a little bit ah yes because I didn't haven't supported on this end normally you would have it support it so now we're gonna let this cool down enough to where I can handle it and then I'll show you one of the bad parts about using this so now you can see that was relatively dirty copper I was able to braise it without cleaning anything and which is also another benefit of it I didn't say over at the bench if you have really really dirty copper a pitted copper that you need to attach to or fix a leak on sometimes your only choice it sprays but you saw how hard I had to get this and how much longer it seemed to take compared to or to heat up compared to using the soft sorry even though I didn't have to clean it so we're gonna let this cool down and then we'll show you one of the other two of these okay so let's just cool down a bit it's still pretty hot but I'm going to show you a couple of the detriments here of using breathing problem so number one you can see how this oxidization on the outside if you don't flow nitrogen through that pipe as you're braising it that's gonna be on the inside you can see you can see how flaky it is see how that all came off alright see it that's all on the inside of the pipe and I'll show you now let me zoom out here a little bit so take something relatively clean here it's just a little warm take this out thanks see all that all this nasty ash stuff all of that is gonna end up in your system see it there all of that not what we want now here's another big detriment to using the brazen Rob alright you saw I couldn't bend this at all by hand now watch this alright you anneal the pipe you get all the strength out of the pipe when you do that when you use brazing rod when you heat it up that much you're basically just annealing the hot copper so your joint is strong your joints fine you joint this nice and strong but the copper around it has been weakened okay so you can see here's the soft solder joint ain't going anywhere this one alright so even in the test that Harris conducted you can see pictures of it you can see here's what the pipe that they use to test it's wedged with another piece of pipe in and into it guess what Theo failed not the joints but the pipe why because the pipe is now weakened now this is more subject to work hardening in vibration granted you're not going to be doing this to it it's more subject to damage from vibration by annealing the copper like that then this piece of hot drawn connected with that soft solder okay so now we're going to do the same thing we're ever going to use a smaller piece of pipe 3/4 here and we're gonna flow nitrogen through it and we're going to see that the inside get that nasty black scale and you can see the inside of this pipe and we'll show this on the bench to has that scale buildup in that that you can see you can see it right there okay so what I have right here now is a piece of 3/4 and I did clean the fitting because even when I braised I usually just give it a quick clean just force I have it and I think it makes everything move a lot faster and you can see on the ground here I have a tank that's my nitrogen tank and I have hooked up to a hose in that hose is inside the pipe and what we're gonna do is we're gonna trickle some nitrogen through here and we're gonna braise this and see how much of a difference that is now the problem with doing that is what happens when this is the align you have to have a place for that nitrogen to escape so you have to be aware that you have to be open somewhere on the other end usually the edge of the evaporator coils and stuff will have a a gauge port some that you can hook to but you need a way for this connection to escape without building up pressure otherwise as you go to braise this it's gonna explode in your face so we're gonna do the same thing I'm going to use the same brazing rod we just use and you can see I didn't use much of it and we're going to connect this putt [Music] you and so I point out cuz I hit the knob with my palm alright so we're gonna let that cool and then gonna wipe down the top here to get all this oxidization off the the top here and then we'll bang it like just like we did and we'll see bandit comes out of that okay so I just took a piece of sand cloth and very lightly went around the other side just to make sure whatever we get out of this is coming from the inside of the pipe and off the outside so they do just like we did before and you can see nothing came out of that no dust that that markets from the outside of the pipe but you can even see I don't know if you guys can actually see in that probably not if you can see inside of that you see nothing there is coming out of that pipe you know tiny few marks up on there that came off but I think that busted off the top of this not the inside of the pipe but he either way you can see how the difference between that and what I just just did now you have the same problem with this in that you can bend it okay so now we're gonna silver solder this bow and steel to copper so we want to clean up the copper which I've already done to this piece here and we want to clean up the inside of the fitting here and do my piece of sand clock just went somewhere and we're just going to give the outside here to quit clean now this is a valve and when you get them their front seat of meaning that the pad in here is all the way up to the top so what we want to do is take it and back that off okay so now even though this is a form of brazing we need a flux so it's a white paste Watson this stuff is almost past it's due date here and just like before we only need a little bit of a skin coat on that not much at all now you can see this is the same as regular soft solder I'm gonna put it in and I like to give them a little twist and I kind of spreads the flux out and also gives a nice little bead around the top of the flux now when we heat this up I mean just tighten this vise when we heat this up the copper is able to conduct heat better than the steel so the copper is actually going to wick away a lot of the heat and the steel is going to get hot first we want them to get the we want them to get hot at the same time the same temperature at the same color cherry red around the same time so what we want to do is concentrate our heat on the copper first until that just starts to get turned Chevy red and then we'll move our torch down and put our heat on the steel and that'll heat up right away and nice and cherry red and then when you thought that the silver solder it now as compared to Bray's this stuff tends to flow a lot easier be a lot more liquidy when you when you heat it up almost like soft solder but it still is a form of breathing so the same thing applies with the nitrogen flow you want to flow nitrogen to do this so let's stop eating it out so let me just make sure everything's in frame before I do that it's not really but that's a little better okay so in stock heating this copper up first and then move to the steel [Music] [Music] we see the slaughters right walk drive right up there the Rockies are they eat it up more there are certain you can see when the watch is working alright that's just time to turn I move my feet down to the field get out and see that [Music] [Music] you see that flowed right and that's it you join if none so let that cool off and then the same thing applies to soft soldering you want to wipe that flux off you got to get that off otherwise that'll turn the the copper clean also so you can actually see where the flux worked see the nice shiny copper here and the dark kind of dingy copper over there now you can tell what they use to connect the pipe with you can't necessarily differentiate faust copper from the 15% silver and are things there anything like that but we never had a problem using the foss copper even over any braze that I've encountered if you had to obviously you want to go with the same thing that they use so I clean this up and you can see it it's kind of a copper rich color whereas this silver solder is a nice gold and the soft solder here is a silver so you can see the difference in colors there and we'll go over all this on the bench also so let's just let that cool down and then we'll go right over to the bed okay so let's take a look at our joints here and we'll start off with this the last one that we did and this is our copper to steel joint and you can see we cleaned up to about here you can see the scratches from sand cloth even though we cleaned it with the sand clock we didn't get put flux up here so you can see it's nice and shiny and clean here but then you have a demarcation line of the oxidization and that's where the flux wasn't so all this shiny spot is where the flux was you can see we're nice and seals all the way around that is just a flux mark that's not a hole you can see it comes right off and you can see that nice kind of gold color that'll differentiate it from other forms of connecting light so let's take a look at our soft solder joint and you can see I get to focus sorry about that you can see here was the little bubble and you can see so that was on the bottom and then you see were nice all the way around so we it was in this orientation here we heat it up hit it once right here tell it because I was a little off with the solder you see how it hit here rolled in and it got sucked in now if I turn it this way where I cut it I don't know if the camera will pick it up but you can see as I was cutting through you can see a little flecks of silver that's where the saw two penetrated I penetrated all the way around but that's just where the the the teeth of the saw didn't match the copper over and you can kind of see that the way it worked into the joint that's about a half inch into it now let's take a look at the inside of the pipe so here's our cutoff piece right he is that little demarcation line of the coupling all right so that's where the two pieces meet and you can see the two halves meet right in that all right and you can see if the camera will pick this up but you can see the silver all the way down to the end here no the camera will pick that up and you can see the copper and there it's nice and shiny and clean and the best part is you can see there's no flux in the line all right you see that see how this there's nothing there's nothing in the line there's no kind of gooey pieces or anything in here so if flux didn't even make it inside the pipe so people saying that flux contamination will kill the system if you do it right you don't get flux in the system alright so now let's take a look at our first raised joint which is the 7/8 piece and you saw how it we did in the copper how it it turned this soft and I can actually bend it by hand and you can see it's compared to say this joint here just how much uglier it looks stabbing that this this looks ugly okay and you can see that the the brazing rod wanted to follow the flame wherever you put the flame to kind of travel with it all right so you kind of instead of this nice little line like so all the way around this is actually better as demonstration here nice little line of solder all the way around that's at most here maybe in a little over an eighth inch out and that's the bottom you get this giant kind of swath of braze over everything whether the heat hits now the problem that the worst problem with this is is if you don't heat it up enough and I'll show you the inside of it here's the inside cutter white if you don't heat that piece up enough right and here you don't heat this up enough unlike the soft solder which traveled all the way down in into here it's only gonna seal around this outside joint so it's only gonna wanna steal around this very very outside and it's not gonna travel down and penetrate in if you don't heat it up enough but I can see traces of it I don't know if the camera will pick it up traces of it here all the way down there here you can see that mops now you can see how dirty it looks inside compared to soft solder and this actually let me me ghetto let me get something white so you can see without the the the nitrogen you can see how oxidized and how nasty this stuff is and now this stuff is all flaky it's loose you saw how much banged out when I banged it against that piece of wood this will come out eventually I can rub my hand on there and you can see it rubbing off right now let's take a look at the nitrogen purged bought a difference that a lot of difference look at look at the difference you have some oxidization here but if you look at it it's impurities being burned out of the the copper itself from heating it up it's just like cute marks it's not oxidization like this alright and I can't you can see here's a nice white cloth you see it doesn't want to flake off and this here I can see the remnants of the Braves joint all the way down and in but you can see the difference and why you need to use the nitrogen purge you can see the difference in the copper there okay so you can see the difference here we have the stay bright number eight with the state clean flux here we have the regular Dynaflow foss copper sticks with nitrogen purge without nitrogen purge and your forty five percent silver solder with state civil flux on a copper to steel joint so each one of these products has its uses but my go-to thing for connecting any refrigeration pipe is always going to be the state right I mean this is this here it's just telling as to why and like I said as far as fatigue heat or using it on discharge lines I haven't had an issue with it at all I urge you to at least try it give it a shot and see see how you like it try try it on one ear systems a non-critical system and and see how you like it it's definitely a very very good product and it's it's my go-to way to join refrigeration tubing as you can see if it's done correctly you don't get any kind of flux in or anything in that system I mean this is a normally accepted way of connecting pipe and you use flux with this but nobody ever screams system contamination with this flux but for whatever reason they do with this and I think a lot of it is just a whole lot of misconception and a lot of it is they think that this is quicker because they don't have to clean the pipe my normal go-to method here I'll use this when I have to re-break something obviously or bridge or a really big gap or where it's indicated by the plan where they specifically request this as the only time that I will use the the brazing rod and obviously any time that I have a copper to steel joint I'll use the 45 percent silver Braves so you have a ton of options out there but definitely look into if you haven't already looking to stay bright and I have used this on 410 a and I haven't had an issue with it so I know some people out there gonna disagree with me and I was perfectly fine a lot of people have set in their ways and there's a thousand ways to do this trade but in my experience like I said 16 years are doing it using state rights since I was first introduced it in introduced to it when I started working for my company and haven't had an issue with it since and no matter what any joint that is not joined correctly will eventually leak whether it is soft soldered braised or silver soldered I mean you see some really nasty joints out there I think that this the the biggest problem people have with but soft solder if they're if they're used to brazen is overheating the pipe the biggest problem that people have with brazing is not heating pipe enough a lot of times you can see how this flowed in nice it's relatively except for that little guy that it's relatively smooth a lot of times you go there and see just globs everywhere and that tells me that they didn't heat up the pipe enough and and joints like that will leak eventually and also this brazing rod works good on dirty pipe if you have to fix a leak on a system where the the tubing is pitted which happens you have to save the system save leak or fix a leak usually the only way to get past that is with braze it won't get clean enough to noose tape right but if it if the copper is in any kind of decent shape and you can sand it and clean it even if has a few pits here and there you can use the state right on it so I mean the choice is yours and like I said and I know some of you guys are gonna vehemently disagree with this but in my experience what you see here is what I come across so thanks for watching this video hope you guys like it sometime next week we'll probably have another beginner video choice up will come up with some ideas and make a quick video on that so thanks for watching see you on the next

Channel: Halligan142

Views: 565,159

Rating: 4.775219 out of 5

Keywords: Brazing, soldering, HVAC, phos-copper, stay-brite, tubing, connecting pipe, copper to copper, copper to steel, Solder (Material)

Id: wJD712DB6S0

Length: 67min 28sec (4048 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 02 2015