8 Oct
2012
8 Oct
'12
10:17 a.m.
On Oct 8, 2012, at 12:57 PM, Ethan Dicks wrote:
They now have a nice PVC heater/bender that I saw
reviewed in Make
Magazine recently. You stuff the PVC in a corrugated tube, plug it in
and wait for the plastic to become soft and nearly limp. I presume one
removes the hot PVC and bends it to shape before it cools (the review
didn't make it clear if you are meant to remove power, then bend, then
cool, then remove, or some other order of operations). I don't know if
they make a 2" version, but the smaller version seemed to be quite
handy for trivial shaping.
Well, I wanted it to remain straight in the end; it just needed to
go straight up through the walls. The problem was one of simple
geometry, specifically inserting a 10-foot pipe vertically into the
wall-ceiling junction of a 6-foot basement. I didn't particularly
want to cut it, and the pipe resumed its previous shape fairly
quickly once I got it into the wall.
I was just lucky enough that the folks who had rehabbed the house
back in the '80s and added an HVAC system had left extra space
around the old chimney when they put in the duct work (and also
lucky that said space intersected my office). I ended up with
a built-in channel running straight from the basement to the
top floor for free; all I needed was to put a pipe in there so
the wires had some guidance going down.
- Dave