Saturday, July 11, 2009


Here are some pictures of the water hammer stopper or air chambers I had to install from the backside. Not terribly fascinating but the soldering in a tight spot was fun. Especially with the wire in the way. Soldering is kind of fun, here are the materials and steps should you take on this type of project.
Materials:
propane torch ( plus striker if you get the manual version)
Lead free solder
Flux (I bought a kit and got Water Flow 2000)
Emery cloth or some scouring device
Pipe cutter

Steps:
Cute pipe. Duh.
Clean the end of the pipe, and the inside of the connector with the emery cloth.
Coat both the inside of the connector and the pipe in flux
Join the two parts, and give a twist to get that flux all over
Heat the joint, by applying heat mostly at the thickest part.
the flux with flow, and turn from clear to white and back to clear. When it is clear then touch the joint with the solder. The solder should flow by now, but if not, keep heating until it does. When it does flow, it is like water and will drip so be warned. The solder should get sucked into the joint.
Easy.


Also I finished tiling the bathroom floor, but not the walls. This picture shows the mortar still drying, before I cleaned it all off. I cant get to the tile store during their stupid hours (8:00-4:30 m-f) so I have to wait until I can take a long lunch AND have a car. May be a while. Anyway, the floor was another Shit! when I started to mortar over the heated flooring element. A few things.....First, no matter what the instructions say, DO NOT mortar and lay tile at the same time. First mortar over the element or pour some self leveling cement to get the mat, and element to stay out of the way. The Trowel kept getting caught on the orange mesh carrier.



I cut into the cement board to bury the thermostat, and the power wire. This should have clued me in to 'First' and 'Third'
Second see 'First'.
Third, mosaic tiles are small tiles that come on a sheet like what I used. When the instructions say " When using mosiac tile" understand what that means. notice above how the blue element runs under the edges of the hex tile. Those edges will be pushed up a little but, and not sit flat, which will end up creating a somewhat lumpy floor. I should have used a self leveling cement first.
I used this grout, and added lots of this bonding agent to help it stick. I also added this to the mortar. A customer in the tiling aisle of homedepot recommended this combo to me. It seemed to be a lot stronger when I had to scrape it out between every freakin space where the mortar came through too much.

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