Well the copper gods must have been smiling on me today...
Managed to get the whole RC done except for the cooling line fittings, everything went smoothly, no hiccups and 100% watertight. :dance:
Threw each piece of pipe in the lathe at slow speed and sanded the ends and middle out and wiped with shellite. Took all of about 20 minutes to clean them all up.
IMG_20160704_104821reduced.jpg
Dry assembled everything to make sure of fit, soldered up all the vapour tubes at one end (the end plate itself was soldered on yesterday).
IMG_20160704_110335reduced.jpg
Flipped over, removed the other loose end plate, and started on the baffle plate. Hammered it gently down to the middle with a spare bit of copper pipe, then carefully poured in little amounts of bakers flux to make sure everything had a coating on it. Then I went nuts using the "Mac shotty" method of cutting up little pellets of solder and dropping them down everywhere. Poked them around with a scribe so they were fairly evenly spread, then heated everything up as evenly as I could to get solder flowing around.
IMG_20160704_112758reduced.jpg
Pretty much everything sealed up, I had to feed in a little more solder here and there to get things moving, but all in all worked pretty well. Some of the fit against the side wall was pretty sloppy (seems my 4" has come off round a bit, the plate was lathed so I know it is round) so I lost a little solder down the sides and the seal wasn't quite perfect all the way around. Doesn't matter, it's sealed about 95% in total around the side and around the vaopor tubes so she'll work just fine. I forgot to get a picture of the baffle plate soldered in.
Fitted the other end plate, hammered down gently till it was hard against the 4", then soldered in all the vapour tubes. Let air cool till the solder hardened, then flipped again so I could do the final soldering between the end plate and the body.
IMG_20160704_111756reduced.jpg
By this stage the heat coming off this thing was immense, I pretty much did all the soldering with the space of around 40 minutes. Normally I let parts air cool for a few minutes then dunk them in water - wasn't game this time, there was so much heat stored up in this thing I was scared that sudden cooling would crack or warp something so I left it to air cool in the sink for a couple of hours. Leak tested, all good. Hacksawed the excess vapour tubes off, I left a little overhang just in case things go pear shaped when I solder on my water fittings, when that is done I'll flapwheel the whole lot flush.
Very happy with my results for the day. Another big thankyou to all the blokes that have gone before me - I reckon reading all those build logs and seeing the success and failures of other soldering jobs prepared me well for this one. I reckon it will be pretty smooth sailing from here on now that I've got a little soldering confidence up. :handgestures-thumbupleft:
IMG_20160704_192012reduced.jpg
You do not have the required permissions to view the files attached to this post.