Quote Originally Posted by Toolmaker51 View Post
Interesting combination of geometry and tube joining process.
I don't recall ever cutting round tubing for welds to round stock; but loads of identical lengths in joining rectangular sizes....angle iron is one of the simplest materials overlooked as ready-made fixturing stock.
I've done more miles upon miles of piping than I care to admit But back sometime around 1982 or 83 I bought my first chop saw to save a bit on oxy& fuel and to hopefully speed things up a bit when working with pipe under 2" I started toying with cutting angles to make the various directional changes needed for corral fencing and how to cut the saddles on the chop saw The same thing can be done with a band saw but it is slower the tradeoff there is a band saw blade will outlast dozens of chop saw blades Carbide toothed metal cutting blades are the ideal ticket particularly if flooded coolant can be added.
For anyone who wants or needs to learn about the millions of ways to work pipe I recommend the Pipe bible also known as. The Pipe Fitters Blue Book or The Pipe Fabricators Blue Book, by W.V. "Duffy" Graves.
They are not cheap but well within the means of most anyone if they even only are curious about how to work pipe.
I could sit here and explain a lot of old tricks I learned through the years many of these will make absolutely no sense to someone who hasn't done much with pipe. Tricks involving your belt and the hole in it tricks using adding machine tape, framing squares, & tri squares on how to figure the setback for cutting and making multi part elbows at any angle or making angle branch offs of a large pie with smaller ones or combining several smaller pipes to make a collector to become a larger diameter pipe but all of that is in the pipe bible. It's been 30 years since I had one and anything I might remember could be far off the actual procedures