Wavysea Owners

[kylecanada]

Do I have to use tubing to connect to the wavysea or can I hard pipe to the wavysea? Thank you.

[ReeferAl]

There is no easy way to hard-plumb.
I did hard -plumb mine though. It's a shame as the fix would be easy for them to make and include with the product. If you don't already have a WS you may have a hard time following when I refer to the parts of the WS.

Sorry I don't have pictures.

First I bought a threaded 1" union. A 3/4 in might work, but my plumbing is 1". You use the part of the union that is flat and the threaded part and ring are discarded. You need to take along the screw-on ring that comes with the WS when you buy the union to be sure the union piece will fit. The unions they had at Home Depot didn't work but those I found at Ace hardware did. I used schedule 80 for better strength.

Second, I bought a short piece of 1/4" steel pipe and reducer bushings to connect the 1/4" up to a threaded fitting to go into the union. This was done to allow me to spin the union part in the drill press. This has to be done to decrease the diameter of the disc down to the size that will fit into the WS ring.

Third, the WS ring is very thin with only a few threads as it is made to hold on their fittings that have very thin discs. The union disc will be thicker and won't allow enough threads to catch. To fix this, I screwed it onto a pipe, clamped the pipe in a vise and then used a portable electric planer to shave down the thickness. You have to be careful to do this evenly so the thickness is uniform. It will never be quite smooth enough however so the final step is to sand it flat. I did this with my disc sander.

You can then substitute this for the tubing fitting they provide. I simply screw it onto a rigid pipe attached into the hood which also serves to support the wavy sea.

Allen

[kylecanada]

Wow. Thanks for the help. I would think they would make a solution for this. I do not have one yet. So I will have to reference back to this when I get it. Thanks again.

[gabe3d]

Good idea Allen. I'll have to try that on mine. I currently do a 4" vynil tubing from the WS to a barbed connection then hard plumb the rest.

[ReeferAl]

One more bit of information. When I sanded the union disc to get the diameter right I had to spin it in reverse so it didn't unscrew. I have a Shopsmith so that is easy to do. I don't know if a normal drill press can do that. With it spinning I then used a belt sander to sand it. This resulted in the sander belt moving in the opposite direction to the spinning disc. This was much faster than just using a sanding block.

I'm sure there are other ways this could be done, but this worked well for me.

Allen