External Water Box

[infinitevalence]

See i told you the bonniville was the right size. if you want you can use a blow torch to melt the solder on the tubes and pull them out and then thread the holes and put barbs in. that might give you a better connection as from what i read the tubes are bent before they are pushed into the holes to guarentee that it fits and then soldered in place.


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me and my l33t asci skillz0r

[Bio-Hazard]

Only problem with pulling out the old tubes is that they are 5/8 O.D. and 9/16 I.D.. I haven't found any barbs with that size threads yet. I mav need to get a adapter somewhere, this is a big tude SOB, better for water flow though......... :twisted:

[infinitevalence]

both tubes out with no problems:


On to the really nice bonus you get with this core -- the pre-drilled holes are perfect in size for a 3/8" -18 NPT tap. If you buy 3/8" NPT x 1/2" barbed fittings, this is a piece of cake. Just thread the existing holes like so:


Then screw in the barbed fittings. To make sure there are no leaks whatsoever, you can add some JB Weld to the threads and then let it dry or use the torch a little more and silver solder the fittings in place.

Before sealing the fittings in place it looks like this:


A tweak for better waterflow through the core:

If you look at the pic, you can see that the fittings are screwed in and they are ready to be soldered...but the ones that are in place have had the threaded section cut down (Dremel + high speed cutoff wheel) to prevent any flow restrictions.

On the far tank, one of the 3/8"npt x 1/2" barbed fittings in its original form is setting on top of the tank to demonstrate the possible problem -- when it is screwed all the way into the tank, it would be very close to the back wall of the tank -- in between the tanks you can see the section of thread that was cut off with the Dremel.

I just threaded the fittings in as far as they would go, marked em with a sharpie (sharpie mark still readily apparent on the threads of the fitting that is screwed into the 1st tank) and then cut them off leaving 3-4 full threads before the sharpie mark. That gives me a little more clearance and no concerns about overly restricting water flow.

To do this correctly, you have to screw the fittings into the tank and then mark them as each top tank is just a little different and that will change how much you have to cut off. If you cut the threads too short, you will have to run down to the auto parts store, buy some new ones and start over.

Tweakage for looks:
I cut 2 panels out of 22 gauge brass sheet and silver soldered them to the sides of the core - they are approximately 2" wide x 10.75" long. Once they were cut and propertly soldered to the core, I cleaned everything up and added primer and black paint to get this:

No more wavy sided look.

Original
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