Hacksaws? Never: It's Tubing Cutters All the Way!
Written: Oct 03 '05
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Product Rating:
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Pros: fast, accurate, and clean; replaceable cutting head
Cons: needs quite a bit of room
The Bottom Line: A tubing cutter is an essential tool for anyone who needs to cut metal tubing - try it once and you'll never go back to a hacksaw!
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| scmrak's Full Review: Sears Tubing Cutter 51272 |
If on the next turn of the great wheel I happen to be reincarnated as a plumber, please, oh please, gods, let me do the rough-in plumbing instead of being the poor schlub who shows up at someone's house at 8:00 PM of a Friday night with a closet auger and a pocketful of faucet washers. There's something so... cool! about sweating copper pipe! and one of the truly fun aspects of this kind of plumbing is using your neat little tubing cutter. No hacksaws for a real plumber, nosiree-bob: it's tubing cutters all the way (we won't talk about that nasty poly pipe, now, will we?)
You say you don't have a tubing cutter? You say you don't even know what one is? Well, let me clue you in: a tubing cutter is a small hand tool that will prove indispensable the next time you need to cut thin-walled metal pipe, be it copper, brass, aluminum, or even conduit. Cuts are fast and accurate, and a tubing cutter won't leave metal filings as a hacksaw does.
You'll need a little room to use a full-size tubing cutter because of the way it works. To cut a pipe, you slip the head of the cutter over the pipe and tighten the big knob finger-tight. The three contact points - two rollers on the bottom and the sharp cutter wheel on the top - form a triangle that holds the cutter in place. Since you can line up the cutting head on your measured mark, it's very accurate.
Once you're set up, you're left with a hand-sized orange "thing" sticking out perpendicular to the pipe. Now, simply rotate the cutter around the pipe a full turn in each direction, and then clamp it down finger-tight again with that big knurled knob. Repeat the process three or four times, and suddenly the tubing simply falls into two pieces. It's faster than a hacksaw and neater than a hacksaw; plus you're guaranteed a cut that's square to the pipe - meaning that you create more secure joints when it comes time to put it all together.
Since the cutting process does have a tendency to put a "reverse flare" on the cut ends, you'll need to jam that wedge-shaped reaming blade (it stocks out from the back of the jaw) into the cut ends of the pipe and twist a couple of times to undo the compression. You can also use the reamer on any piece of pipe to put on a little flare or remove a bit of a burr.
This particular tubing cutter accommodates tubing from 1/8 to 1-1/8 inches OD, which is pretty much an industry standard. Its die-cast body is painted a bright orange to keep it from disappearing under sinks or in dark basements. At about seven inches long, it does require quite a bit of working room if you need to cut pipe in place, but a more compact design is available for those tight spaces, or you can get a similar full-size arrangement that ratchets. The cutting wheel on mine is replaceable, though I haven't ever needed to swap it out - you'd have to do a lot of cutting or cut stuff that's harder than copper to wear one out.
Trust me on this: Every plumber should have a tubing cutter in that tool belt.
Recommended:
Yes
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