ANTEX Pipemaster Soldering Tool

[SHADOWFOX]

Anybody have any experience with this tool? I saw it on the recent Wokbench magazine and it looks pretty neat.

[RayintheUK]

I bought one maybe 15 or 20 years ago. Utter crap.

I'll qualify that - I bought it to un-solder some joints in an area that had been recently re-papered. Simply wouldn't do it and I had to resort to gas. If it won't un-solder, my take is that it barely heats enough for a decent joint. In the bin it went.

Ray.

[messmaker]

Sorry to hear that. It looked like a great idea. I thought it might be especially handy in cramped quarters.

[scorrpio]

Useless gadget. You still need to cut the pipe to size, ream it, clean it, and flux it. I dunno if it works with standard solder, or only with those 'pre-soldered fittings' - that would exclude it immediately as presoldered are crap.

A friggin $116? I can buy a lifetime supply of MAPP for that much.

Only goes to 3/4" - in newer, larger homes, 1" pipes are rather common. My recent heating overhaul was about 75% 1" copper soldering.

Now, on safety thing. This tool takes a whole 4(four) minutes to go from cold to hot. Apparently, if you got more than one joint to make, you will want to keep it hot(wasting electricity). Now when I work with electronics, my hot soldering iron sits in its spiral wire stand, within easy reach. Where do you store THIS hot mama when not using it? I also know that touching a hot iron to a combustible can get it smoldering. I'd say this device will have the same problem. My $30 torch, on the oher hand, goes from 0 to 3600F by pressing a button - and instantly back to 0 at releasing the button. Between uses, it sits nice and safe in my toolbelt or on the floor nearby, wasting nothing. Oh, another safety bonus of the torch: it keeps the work area VERY well lit.

On accessibility thing. I'll just laugh. Are they saying those bulky jaws (to their own size, add extra clearance for getting them around the pipe AND not touching any combustibles in the process) can get into tighter spaces than this:


Or, if the space is real tight, this:


Slipping a heat blanket behind the pipe is all you need to protect the surfaces. I just recently been working in a place in my basement where I have two 3/4" and one 1" pipe running inside a joist bay, pipes being less than 1" from each other. Getting the jaws of that tool arond those pipes would be impossible. Torch? No problemo. Tacked heat blanket to subfloor and joist, and delivered pinpoint heat precisely where needed.

I think this tool is good only for people with open flame phobia.

[crokett]

Chris,

What's even quicker and easier is Sharkbite push-on toolless fittings by Cash-Acme. Plumbing supply places will carry them or similiar. With them and Pex it took all of about 2 minutes to make my connections for the washer/dryer. They are pricier than soldered connections but unless you have the torch, flux, reamer, etc already they end up cheaper, esp for small jobs. There is also no learning curve.