Questions about drop tubes (vertical) - connection to bottom of pan

[TimJ]

While walking through the plumbing aisle of home depot this past week I saw an item that I did not notice before - the water hammer arrestors or something similar. These particular ones had open ends of 1/2" which then neck up to 3/4" or so.

Rather than flaring the ends of these I was wondering if I could instead use 1/2 couplings cut down and solder those onto the pan and the part of the 1/2" tube that comes up from the bottom of the pan. It would be ugly and the bottom of the pan would have these cylinders sticking up through them - but it seems like a lot less labor than getting it all flush.

I'll try to get pics posted up soon.

In order to do dissimilar metals, or SS in particular do I need to use silver solder, or can I get away with the common solder used for copper?

[lfdiaff]

You could use them I thought about it when I built mine. The flare it what gives it strength. My flare was about 1/8''. And yes dissimilar metal you need to use silver solder. Lead free would work until it was bumped or that pan flexed. With the silver solder you could drive over it. FYI silver solder is just below gold in price.

[dufftj]

I used 95/5 canfield solder and have had no problems...I soldered in a 3 1/2 copper cookie to close up the strainer hole of a single compartment sink that I use for my front pan, put over forty gallons through it last season with the wood touching the copper and not one leak. This year I used 7/8 ths type L copper tubing with sweat caps and flared the ends with a ridgid flaring tool. Punched the holes in each steam table pan with a greenline knockout and soldered them in with the same solder on the inside of the pans first then the bottoms. The trick to getting the solder to flow between the two dissimilar metals is very low heat.I have a torch set up with a prest-o-lite regulator and a soft flame tip that burns acetelene, the flame is very long and you can use just the ends of the tip with a waving motion to control the heat. I've only test fired the drop tubes this season due to very little sap collected this year, but i fired for a couple of hours just prepping for the season and messing with my stack pre heater.

Tim