On 11/24/21 5:22 PM, Joshua Thomas wrote:
>> Work hardening is why people get drunk looking primaries when using
> refrigeration tubing.
>
> Hah! That's exactly what happened with my primary. It's circular-ish. It
> apparently works fine, but it's ugly. I've been trying to find the secret
> people are using to get these really nice looking spirals with copper
> tubing, and I think the magic is a setup where you have to move the copper
> as little as possible.
>
That is precisely what you do. You have the box with the coiled tubing
in it, you put the coil on your primary supports. And then, you
carefully and smoothly form it into your supports with minimum handling.
You can also get one of those springy bending helpers (they are a
closefitting spring that fits over the tubing) and that prevents
kinking, but it really doesn't help with getting the radii smoothly
changing. If one had to do a lot of them, you might work out some sort
of thing with three rollers (a standard bending jig) where the rollers
gradually change spacing as you pass the tubing through.