Tool for tightening fittings on HDPE pipes

Hello everyone, gentlemen, homemade products. Today there will be a banal post on how to twist or unscrew a fitting on a HDPE pipe if it has not been unscrewed for a long time.

The post was born because of my neighbor, who on the weekend changed a piece of pipe at the dacha, because he stupidly forgot to drain the water for the winter and one section of the highway burst. In fact, everything was simple, it was necessary to unscrew the plastic fittings, replace the pipe section and screw them back. But he could not unscrew them with his hands, so he simply cut them off, went to the store and bought new ones.

I have similar irrigation pipes on my site, which I disassemble and put in a shed for the winter. During the watering season, the same problem with fittings was, it is not possible to unscrew it just like that. I used a primitive device.

We take a spanner and a bicycle chain. The neighbor has all this, but he did not realize how to use it.

Next, we pass one end of the chain into the eye of a spanner wrench as shown in the photo. We circle the chain around the fitting and run the other end back into the key eye.

Then you already understood, we throw the chain over the fitting and select its slack.

We press the ends of the chain to the handle of the key and wrap the key on a break so that the chain tightens itself from your effort. That's all banal and simple.

The second problem was that the new pipe section needed to be aligned.

Well, then I thought of it, we put an ordinary building hairdryer into the pipe and heat it from the inside. Then it aligns itself.

For a section of pipe of almost 2 meters, it took 10 minutes of blowing with a hairdryer for it to level out.

It happens that this device with a chain and a key also does not allow the fitting to be unscrewed, it sour painfully over the season and, with efforts, the pipe itself begins to twist. In this case, I heat the fitting itself with a hairdryer and it simply unscrews.

Later, when assembling the irrigation, I began to coat the threads of the fittings with grease and there are no more problems with disassembly.

Here is such a banal homemade product. I did not discover America, but maybe it will be useful for someone to refresh their knowledge. Thank you all for your attention, subscribe and do not miss new homemade products. Peace and Goodness to you.