Can Your Refrigerator Help?
kay, so you’re probably pretty familiar with the virtues of heat guns, especially when it comes to jobs like wiring components with heat-shrink connectors, removing flaky varnish, and—last but not least—interfacing lengths of sanitary hose (especially the stiff, thick high-end stuff ) with barbed fittings on MSDs, vented loops, and three-way Y-valves. But here’s something you perhaps have never thought of.
If heat is helpful on some projects, what about cold? Or more to the point, is there something to be gained by pressing the freezer in your onboard refrigerator into service under certain (shall we say, challenging) conditions?
Consider the following scenario. Let’s say you’re having a heck of a time getting a long piece of ornery sanitary hose onto a sanitary-type component’s barbed fitting. You’ve tried heating the hose, smearing the inside of it with everything from saliva to dishwashing detergent to smoothing the fitting to slightly reduce its size with emery paper. Nada? Nope, nothin’ works! But hey, try this one last thing—toss the problematic component into the freezer overnight. While the heat gun is going to
Oexpand the hose in the morning, the component’s frosty overnight hiatus may simultaneously shrink its outside diameter, perhaps just enough to facilitate a happy interface that was not really possible before. — Capt. Bill Pike