Tubing for water cooling is specially made to withstand long periods of time without any discoloration, deformation, or degradation. If aesthetics is one of your main goals with liquid cooling, and you plan to use colored coolants, make sure that you choose a quality tubing that will stay crystal clear as long as it can. Low-grade cheap tubing can lose its transparency in a matter of days and it often becomes yellow. These fittings are advantageous if you’re familiar with using compression fittings. Because they’re typically used in low-pressure systems and tend not to require a user to do any soldering/welding, they’re suitable for domestic use.

Fittings are manufactured from high-quality brass materials which ensure a permanently tight and secure connection, without the use of special tooling or additional sealant. These fittings are suitable for connecting a wide range of tubes, including copper tubes in accordance with EN 1057, carbon steel to EN 10305, stainless steel to EN 10312 and plastic pipes to BS 7291, EN 15875 and EN 15876. Since 1947, Swagelok has been the leader in advancing tube fitting technology used in industrial fluid system application across nearly every industry. Swagelok Founder Explains His Revolutionary Tube Fitting We would wrap up this article at this moment, although we are certain that we didn’t cover all the small details. As we said at the start, this subject is very broad, there are many choices, but we hope that we managed to cover the basics. In one of the future articles, we will cover the subject of angled adaptersand other special connectors, such as T-Splitters and Ball Valves!Swagelok-certified trainers are available to teach courses on topics such as Tube Fitting Installation and Tube Fitting Inspection at locations and times convenient to you. These compression fittings are marked with two numbers that state the inner diameter (ID) and outer diameter (OD) of the tubing that is compatible with the fitting. Both these number markings of the tubing must match with the fitting. As for the old-school barb fittings, there is only one number present, the OD of the barb, which has to match with the ID of the tubing that will be used. Thankfully, both the tubing and fitting types are standardized, so you are able to choose from 10/13, 10/16, and 12/16 sizes of soft tubing compression fittings.

Place a pipe insert into the end of the pipe to be joined. Pipe inserts, typically made from plastic or steel, reinforce pipes and keep them in a fully circular shape, making connection easier. It should be noted that this only applies to plastic pipes and not copper or steel pipes as they are much strongerThe liquid cooling market provides three diameters of soft tubing that are the most common. Tubes are marked with ID and OD which stand for „Inner Diameter“ and „Outer Diameter“. There are two ways to mark the fittings, one is using metric millimeters (mm) and the other is using imperial inches (“). These three most common tubes are marked with numbers such as:

Straight Couplers , Reducing Couplers , Male Couplers , Female Couplers , Elbows 90 deg , Wallplate Elbows , Long Radius Elbows , Angled Wallplate Adaptors ,Stop Ends, Straight Tap Connectors , Bent Tap Connectors , Tees , Reduced Branch Tee , Both Ends Reduced Tee , Reduced End Tee , Reduced End and Branch Tee , Straight Cylinder Union , Bent Cylinder Union The traditional ways to connect copper pipes are with capillary joints that you need to solder, and brass compression joints that you tighten with an adjustable spanner. However, plastic push-fit joints are just as effective - and much simpler to use. They come with rubber O-rings for sealing, and work well with both plastic and copper pipes. Safety firstWhile in the early days we had simple barb fittings, nowadays the market has narrowed down to only compression type fittings. While barb fittings are still available for workstation purposes and applications where the aesthetics are not a key point, the market is dominated by compression type fittings. The compression fittings themselves are divide into two major categories which are, Soft Tubing Compression and Hard Tubing Compression fittings, or for short STC and HDC. Soft Tubing Compression Fittings