Ghetto Fab

I’d gotten tunnel vision with this water pipe thing repeatedy bashing and zapping the thing. Both Dave and Chucky came up with the solution of cutting the pipe and replacing the offending section with hose. Doh! Simple and effective. I was even able to take the pipe to Napa and they found a close match of the curves in a preformed hose, nice! My only concern was retaining the hose onto the cut sections of pipe, usually there are flares of some type to help keep hoses from blowing off fittings. My first attempt was to solder a ring of heavy wire to the end. That met with failure. Perhaps needed to get even more aggresive with the grinding and get it cleaner, but it wasn’t looking promising. A search of the Net came up with a couple solutions. One was to run a bead of weld. I could do that. Another was to find a cheap Chine sheet metal bead roller and mod it. Of course could fork out the dinero for a real pipe bead roller. But the other method using a homebrew tool to “roll” a bead looked interesting. It involves sacrificing a Vice-grip, or suitable China substitute (although even Vice-Grip brand ones are made in China now) and moding the jaws to approximate the action of a bead roller. The simplest I saw was to weld two lumps on one jaw, and a single meshing lump on the opposite jaw. The next was to take a exhaust tubing clamp of the correct side and welding it to one side jaw, and a thick washer to mesh in the groove in the other jaw. From the pictures, that seemed top work pretty well, but the washers were reported to often fail. I then found someones solution to that was to use a woodruf key.That sounded like the best setup to me, so I ran by Napa and got me the closest size pipe clamp. Then hopped on over to City Mill and picked up a sub $10 Vice-grip type plier and a few woodruf keys. The pipe clamp spacing between the two plates was too wide for what I wanted, so I took a cutting disk to it and split the sides and flipped them around. Some more grinding of the jaws of the pliers and then zapped the plates and woodruf key onto the jaws. I had to wedge in those washers between the two plates after my first attempt caused the plates to bend in. After that, I was golden! It’s slow going as you need to clamp the pliers down, open it, shift the tool a tiny bit over, clamp again, repeat until you go all the way around, then tighten the pliers a little and repeat until done. My goodness, it works! By my second flange I figured it took about three passes to create a nice flange. Check it out, the shiny pipe is the ghetto fabbed bead, the painted pipe is the OEM bead. Not bad for $10, vs $300!