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Okay, we're about to connect the water supply to this demonstration tap here in order to
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show you how a compression, a copper compression joint works. The joint works as it says on the tin, pretty much, compressing a copper or brass olive
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between the nut of a compression joint and the fitting it's going into
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And you'll see from this close up that the olive fits into a little recess in the fitting
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which allows it to stay still while we turn the nut to compress
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It's very important that as with soldered joints we clean the pipe first using some wine
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wire wall to make absolutely sure there are no little bits of grit or anything on the pipe
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because if they get in between the olive and the recess it will cause a little drip so having
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cleaned the pipe the first thing that goes on obviously is our nut then the olive the camera
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can see that with my fingers when that's in place we push the pipe up into the fitting making
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absolutely sure that it's fully in and then we start to tighten up on the nut and at some point
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obviously we will need to use a spanner to make sure that we've got that now after a couple of
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turns you will begin to feel the nut bite into the fitting that when the olive is started to compress and by taking my hand way you can see that that pipe now is supported by the compression of the olive into the fitting
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So we know that olive is starting to compress. So we are then going to just turn once and then another half a turn
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And that will be enough to compress that olive into that fitting
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The danger that we have is if we over-tighten this olive, we're going to compress the copper too much and that's going to cause a drip
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So it's better to give it a one-and-a-half turns, turn the water on, double-check to see whether that's weeping
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If it's we're weeping, we can always pinch it up a bit
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If we've overtightened in the first place, there's nothing we can do about it except start again
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but if we under tighten it we can pinch it up just a little bit to make sure it's watertight so that's how we use a compression joint when you're tightening fittings it's always a good idea to hold on use another spanner of some kind to hold the other end of the fitting to make sure nothing moves so as we tighten the nut here then this tap body isn't going to move or at the rest of our compression fitting if we're using an elbow job
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joint, a straight coupling or whatever, we need to make sure it doesn't move because if it is
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allowed to move and we're turning this, the fitting could move and actually bend or kink the pipe
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So make absolutely sure that everything's still when you tighten compression joints
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So there we go. How to use a compress. How to tighten a compression joint in copper plowing
