edit: I did not even see when I posted this that they had made this open source with the downloadable STL to print your own connectors. Great move on them!
With coffee stirrers! That's such a cool idea, to be able to print the connectors and then use something cheap, off the shelf, and easily cut as the "pipe". Brilliant!
I can see that being a pretty fun cheapo building toy for the kids. Might have to grab a pack of stirrers and run off a couple handfuls of connectors. Very cool.
With the added benefit of built-in upscaling! I would have loved, as a kid, to design my own "clubhouse" with coffee stirrers before going out in the yard and building a full sized one to chill in.
I remember seeing their booth at the Orlando Maker Faire years ago. Metal pipe was a bit too expensive for my budget but I was still inspired by their display and started using PVC and custom 3D printed connectors in my gardening projects.
I love how much work they've done on connectors. In my experience with PVC, one of the biggest hurdles to making interesting projects is finding prebuilt connectors for anything besides simple 90-degree angles. It makes sense given that most PVC projects are for construction rather than hobby projects, but it's still annoying.
Having pre-drilled screw holes is also a nice bonus.
PVC plumbing fittings come in 22.5 degree variations between 0 and 180, just as an aside. It's what I use for most gardening projects. It lasts longer than thin wall conduit would, and is much less expensive than the thick wall steel pipe.
There are lots of options online but I've noticed that our local Home Depot is missing a surprising amount of common connectors and our Lowe's barely carries any.
Actual plumbers (and electricians, fitters, tinners, etc) buy stuff from supply houses, that’s why the selection is garbage. Some supply houses will sell to people off the street, some will not.
This is because the customers at Home Depot and Lowe's are primarily muggles. The wizards will pop in if they need something and it's convenient, but by and large they buy at wizard stores that stock the full range of fittings.
Said wizard stores sometimes have a handwritten sign taped up on the wall behind the counter dating back to the Carter administration that reads "Those in the trade will be served first"[0].
Your reward for being a wizard is having competent help at the store, and the fittings haven't been randomly distributed among the bins by a million prior muggles.
Electrician wizards similarly work with electrical supply stores, not Home Depot if they can avoid it. Carpenter wizards cross over a little more, but they generally prefer to work with lumber yards that deliver[1] and have halfway decent lumber[2].
[0] Yes, literally.
[1] I believe the box stores do to, but they charge handsomely because they don't really want to.
[2] 2x3's are crap everywhere, but the quality on anything bigger goes up immensely at a real lumberyard.
> [2] 2x3's are crap everywhere, but the quality on anything bigger goes up immensely at a real lumberyard.
This was once the case, but I've not found it to be true in recent history (in NorCal anyway). Lumberyards are getting 2x4/6/8 stock in roughly the same quality as the big box stores, and the only difference appears to be service and turnover rate.
Covid's effects on the lumber supply chain are lasting - many sawyers and mills have closed, and what's left is produced to meet a price point.
Because they are trying to make a profit and so have gotten rid of things that don't see much.
While sometimes I would make the argument that the lack of inventory is why people go online instead, in this case I think that is wrong. Their target market is home owners doing plumbing, and plumbing rarely needs those odd connectors. Frankly if you have small PVC/cPVC water pipes (as opposed to larger drain pipes) I would replace them with PEX where practical, and cut them off where not and install a PEX adapter. (I'd also do that for copper or iron pipes - copper because it might have lead solder but if it doesn't you are good for a while; iron because it hasn't been common in so long that anything you see is probably past expected lifespan)
PVC is considered as the most environmentally damaging plastic and one of the most toxic substances for inhabitants of our planet. From cradle to grave, the PVC lifecycle (production, use, and disposal) results in the release of toxic, chlorine-based chemicals, and it is one of the world's largest dioxin sources.
Curious what you consider 'lasts longer' as all of my garden support frames and nets are held up by conduit for about 10 years and I'm not seeing any signs of significant rust..
Galvanized EMT conduit will rust, especially if you let water get inside and it does not drain. I use silver spray paint on all cut or drilled spots, and drill tiny holes on the underside of any horizontal runs that descend from verticals. (E.g. I've bent EMT into four-sided frames for doors, etc). I have outdoor EMT structures (trellises, garden gates, chicken run frames, geodesic domes) that are 25 years old and going strong. :)
Agreed though -- PVC pipe (the white stuff) does very poorly with exposure to UV light. The beige CPVC stuff is worse. The black PVC (ABS?) is supposed to be better, but less available in small gauges. And the grey plastic stuff used for electrical conduit is also supposedly UV-safe, but is far less structurally rigid than any of the others, or of course galvanized EMT. Sometimes that flexibility is a virtue, but usually not.
> PVC pipe (the white stuff) does very poorly with exposure to UV light
To my understanding, this is primarily an aesthetic issue. PVC pipes have been tested over years of UV exposure and remain structurally sound. This is a topic that comes up periodically on the pool forums since it is pretty common to have some amount of exposed PVC pipes above ground.
EMT conduit isn't a great support material if you're handling human weight loads. The picture on the front page showing off the strength is visibly bending. It's kind of an awkward load profile, lower weight like an awning you're probably using ABS, higher weight you're using 1 1/4" system like steeltek or keeklamp
Right. There are many structural pipe fitting systems. Here's one.[1] Grainger, McMaster-Carr, and larger hardware stores stock them. Usually, they use bigger pipe. Fittings are really cheap on Alibaba.
If it is structural I'd buy from a big place not Ali. Unless you have the ability to verify the material really has the claimed properties you need you should stick with a major trusted supplier who will either verify the factory produces fittings to spec, or test everything for you.
If it is to support a human I would tend to agree, but for desks etc. I have found local supplies (Canada) have declined in quality to such a degree they need the level of QA on arrival the Chinese ones do while costing 5-10x as much.
Paying big bucks for a paper trail is almost never cost or time effective compared to just adding safety factor for "normal applications".
And by "normal applications" I mean "please nobody be intentionally obtuse and start nit picking about aerospace applications and connecting rod bolts and whatnot".
There will always be a weakest link. At some point you just gotta be an adult and not build things to within an inch of their lives for the use they will see and then have the self control to not push the limit. Resources are limited and engineering tradeoffs are everywhere. These discussions always devolve into absurdity very quickly.
It just isn’t very absurd to worry that the question mark brand of load bearing fasteners are properly rated.
I avoid the issue by not buying them, a lesson learned from my experience working in the QA field. I wouldn’t expect a teenager to have learned this lesson.
If you're buying hardware that has any possibility of harming someone or doing any amount of non-trivial damage if it fails from AliExpress or Amazon, you're doing it wrong and should reconsider whatever it is you're doing. Even the hardware from HD is generally pretty shitty these days. If you can't afford or won't go buy it from Fastenal or MMC or somewhere reputable, where you can expect the hardware you're buying actually adheres to a stated grade or spec, you just shouldn't do it.
I don’t know what you lot think is so dangerous about a few supports for netting that keeps the squirrels off the vegetables. Please spare us the safety lectures, we are adults.
But 3/4" is also readily available, and much stronger. And of course larger gauges are available as well, just more difficult to bend with a standard manual bender.
I wouldn't use it for scaffolding(!) or anything supporting dynamic loads in the human-scale, but I've sistered three 3/4" EMT pipes together for an extremely strong, rigid, and inexpensive support pole.
This is structurally rated steel tube - it will hold much more than the EMT, it is meant for holding things, and being square, it's often easier to work with.
EMT is light weight, readily available on weekend evenings, inexpensive, cuts easily, bends easily, is reasonably rustproof, and good enough for many applications.
It is "appropriate technology" for some applications, but of course there are better options when the requirements approach its critical limits!
I've used EMT to build big hoop trellises for growing vines. Bends smoothly into pairs of 10' arcs (using some ad hoc jigs), weighs almost nothing, requires minimal paint protection, supports more curcubits than our friends and family can consume, and lasts ~forever.
One of the tricks with EMT construction is to leverage the design for structural rigidity. E.g. geodesic domes with short members are extremely strong. Anything in compression will do well. If you need resistance to deflection across a long unsupported span, then I definitely agree -- EMT is not your material of choice!
(steel tubing is available on weekends and evenings too, fwiw)
I agree it's good enough for random aesthetic stuff, but even outdoor stuff is silly to use it for if you care about aesthetics. It really does rust pretty quickly these days. I have plenty of EMT that is 20 years old and not rusted, and plenty next to it that is 5 years old and rusty.
The latter is from different vendors, too. The specs over the years have gotten worse because nobody really uses EMT outdoors without painting it unless they are willing to accept it rusting to crap.
For your case, you could just use pvc pipe, cheaper, bends easier, cuts easier, can be glued directly, will never rust, you don't care about weight limits.
However, if you remember where we started, this article is about "structural pipe fittings" for EMT.
PVC pipe does not survive outdoors, and the failure mode is messy.
"Structural" does not necessarily mean "very strong".
I think we mostly agree here though. I've used EMT for lots of things, and it has never ever let me down even slightly. I have also chosen square steel tubing for (less frequent) cases.
Choosing carefully is the key. When EMT fits, it's great stuff and preferable in many ways.
I hear this in other comments, but I cannot reconcile it with my own direct experience with brittle white PVC pipes.
There are a few grades of white PVC, including Schedule 40. There must be a subset of options which are appropriate for outdoor use.
[Edit: FWIW A superficial web search agrees with me that standard white PVC will degrade in UV. A common recommendation is to use "furniture grade" PVC, or to paint or wrap the pipe to protect it. In this context I'm mostly thinking about options available at ordinary hardware stores, not special order stuff, but apparently there are options.]
Other reasons to choose EMT though: thinner, more heat-resilient, less prone to sag, stronger by thickness, subjectively more attractive.
Do you have a good source for these load calculations. I poked around on the site but didn't see anything representing an L/360 or other strength rating despite these fasteners being large enough to hurt people doing things if they don't know any better.
It would be great to just have one nice calculator to lookup trustworthy load data on standard home depot materials.
Emt will eventually rust if not painted as well, depending how much you care. It is really mostly used in open commercial/industrial settings (if you go to home depot or Costco you will see emt running everywhere).
Aluminum is your obvious metal winner for this sort of thing outdoors (cost wise). PVC, even thick wall, becomes brittle pretty quickly in sunlight.
This is why you see wood or outdoor plastics for raised garden beds
The "discounted" bundle is such an anti-pattern. I'm saving the price of one fitting, out of 20. So if the bundle has even one fitting that I have no use for, the whole deal falls apart, and I should have bought them individually instead. Anyone with the volume to make use of all connectors would probably want to negotiate a better deal anyway.
It tends to be highly valuable for mechanical tools like these. Think of this product more like hardware (nuts/bolts/screws, not PC hardware) than a standalone "product". Most people who have a shop or do a lot of tinkering keep an assortment of misc hardware around just so they have it on hand whenever the need arises. This falls into a similar category, so having a grab bag to be able to handle whatever potential scenario you run into would be incredibly handy.
In contrast, the bundle lists for $88.10...that's a lousy price delta of $4.84 (approx. 1 fitting). In consumer hoodwinking terms, it's the equivalent of buy-21-get-1-free...except the "value proposition" comes at a cost of zero optionality and overweight T fittings.
If you've got the cash to burn on benchstock at this price point, more power to you, but the point is you're really paying a premium to throw away choice for the illusion of value with this bundle.
(At a past startup, we used 80/20 for the structure of our factory stations. We were very happy with how 80/20 was easily adapted during prototyping and testing, and then our final station design could be replicated quickly stateside to several stations, then disassembled into a few assemblies for flight, reassembled at the factory in Asia, and hold up well in production, and it also looked professional for demos. A lot of that success was due to the know-how and effort of our mechE, but, IMHO, 80/20 is appealing to people who grew up with Lego-like toys, and even I, primarily a software person, felt I could do useful things with it and some basic tools.)
My armchair assessment is that both will have their uses. 80/20 is 3-4x the price, but is lighter and more rigid than EMT conduit. EMT conduit is sold everywhere and will be more useful for quick and dirty setups.
For a machine like a 3d printer, I would choose 80/20. For some lightweight shelves, EMT conduit or wood. So I see this product almost as a wood replacement rather than a 80/20 replacement.
Steal can be bent without failing. I believe 80/20 has less flex than a similar sized pipe? But when it gets bent you’re done. So there will be situations where steel is a better choice.
I think it’s early days for Maker Pipe so I’m not going to dunk on them too hard for this, but I noticed the lack of angles means you can’t build for instance a 3:2 rectangle with cross braces to prevent racking. You have to do squares only. Kee seems to have solved that problem.
I am just wrong due to incomplete info. The page I originally clicked on only had about half of the full catalog on it, and the way it was constructed I presumed it to be exhaustive.
There’s a 180° adjustable fitting that does exactly what I described, as a sibling to the link you provided.
Not quite the same, but EMT conduit is very popular for shade structures at Burning Man and similar events. You can get fittings that will hold up very well in windy conditions (if properly secured) https://formandreform.com/blackrock-hardware/
As a cheap and quick alternative for making simple structures, my dad used to join pieces of conduit by flattening the ends in a vise and drilling holes for bolts and nuts.
Are these elements friction-fit? That seems to be a majorly bad idea if you want to handle loads, especially if you want these fixtures to be permanent.
A speck of grease or oil could make your structure collapse.
Doubly bad, the friction seems to be created by screws that can get loose with time/ not be tightened with the proper torque.
Also, an Europe specific thing (I think), is that we don't use metallic pipes for electric wiring, we use PVC.
There's plenty of metal conduit for electrical wiring in Europe. Dunno where you got that idea. It's mainly used in commercial buildings where they don't care about things looking nice. In houses cables are chased into the wall, or just stuffed behind the plasterboard.
In the US you use PVC for outdoor installations, and steel conduit for indoor... with some exceptions that I'm sure someone will be quick to lambast me for.
PVC conduit is used for some underground applications, it isn’t (typically) used outdoors above ground since UV light destroys it.
You can use EMT w/ raintight compression fittings or galvanized RMC outdoors (or PVC-coated RMC if you have lots of money and/or want it to last 50 years).
Steel conduit (or metal-clad cable) is typical for indoor commercial installations, aside from some specific places where aluminum or PVC is used, like an MRI room.
In college I hung blackout curtains in my dorm room with conduit - IIRC it was maybe $5 for a pipe that was longer, sturdier, cheaper, and less annoying than the typical telescoping curtain rods (where the curtain always gets caught up on the telescoping edges as you open it).
I also love that you can add structural bends with readily available (and relatively compact) conduit bending tools. Gotta love economies of scale.
Ah, piping, all about moving something from A to B. Has anyone else read Leslie Claret's classic text "The Structural Dynamics of Flow"? I got the chance to hear him speak, once. It was riveting: "Hey, let me walk you through our Donnely nut spacing and cracked system rim-riding grip configuration. Using a field of half-seized sprats and brass-fitted nickel slits, our bracketed caps and splay-flexed brace columns vent dampers to dampening hatch depths of 1/2 meter from the damper crown to the spurv plinth. How? Well, we bolster 12 husk nuts to each girdle jerry — while flex-tandems press a task apparatus of ten vertically composited patch-hamplers — then pin flam-fastened pan traps at both maiden apexes of the jim-joists."
I struggled to decode this and thought it was an LLM spouting drivel -- haha. After reading I see now that this is a character from a comedy called "Patriot". Got it!
I felt like I was walking through an industrial space and bonked my head on "piping" trying to read this -- hahaha! TY for melting my brain just a tiny bit.
EMT is pretty flimsy stuff, why would you build anything with it when extruded aluminum and strut channel exist? Or even RMC, it’s much stronger than EMT. I know it’s a cost thing, but use the right material for the job.
There’s absolutely no way I’d trust a desk made of EMT, if someone leans on it too hard it will crumple immediately.
That would be 2.54 times 1/100th of the distance light travels in a vacuum during 1/299,792,458 of the time it takes for 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of a cesium-133 atom, if you prefer.
While there is a 1 inch measure in common use that is as you described, the subject here is EMT. There is no dimension in EMT that is 1 inch by the system you describe. The diameter is close to 1 inch, but it is noticeably different to the naked eye, and for all useful purposes different enough that anything actually 1 inch in diameter is not compatible.
You see a lot of this in the bicycle industry. There are a lot of older standards in use like 9/16” pedal threads, 1 1/8” steerer tubes or 1” (25.4mm) handlebars but any new standard is metric - so bottom brackets, wheels, newer seat post diameters are all metric. It can make for some very strange looking spec sheets.
So yeah, a weird measurement unit. Technically the symbol to be used is a prime symbol (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_(symbol)), but what’s used in practice is anything that looks close enough.
I have been shopping for pickup truck bed organization racks that are in the thousands of dollars, but can never pull the trigger because they do not seem like they should cost that much. If I can design these to support the weight I need they will find their way in to the truck bed and my overlanding rig.
I think you’re far better off with black pipe or rigid metal conduit than EMT (thinner conduit which is not even allowed to support a light or outlet per the electrical code).
Black pipe is still pretty cheap and way stronger than EMT.
actual structural steel round and square tube in 20' sections from a steel supplier isn't any more expensive than black pipe and is stronger and considerably easier to work with (no paint, less grainy). you can also make your own fittings since the right tube sizes are nesting. I do 1" square and clamps made out of 1-1/4" with 1/8" wall. that is quite a bit stronger than emt for maybe 20% additional cost.
All true; as a DIYer, it's a damn lot easier to buy pipe from Home Depot or Lowes than chase down the local steel supplier and figure out how to either get 20' lengths of tubing home or deal with asking them to cut it for what they know is a grand total of two tubes ever in your lifetime as a customer.
the places I go they don't mind if you bring a portaband or a cut off wheel and spend a couple minutes in their yard. actually the place I often go has a chop saw out front. delivery in the city is $20. another place is happy to do cuts for $5, but you have to not mind waiting around for them to get to it.
Probably a little pricier but I’ve had great success with linear rails for projects like that. There’s a ton of sizes and accessories like wheels and plates and various hardware
+1 for rails like these. I’ve used 10 series aluminum extrusions in a roof rack, roof top tent, awning and solar panel setup. I purchased all mine and accessories from here
One thing to keep in mind with this stuff is that it's really heavy. Regular aluminum square tube is much lighter for a given length/size. If you're making something that moves, it may be worth the effort to grab some plain square extrusion and hand-fabricate some brackets.
For a larger project, consider buying from Alibaba. ~5 years ago I built a series of workbenches using 20 series and even with the shipping from China costs, I saved 2-3x over buying from the maker places. IIRC, final total was around $700.
Took a welding class recently, it wasn’t that hard to get something pretty strong that could be ground and painted to look nice. You could build exactly what you want with a couple hundred for a stick welder and safety gear. Some places that teach welding will also let you rent their gear/shop time.
Unistrut is probably the better choice because there's a better/cheaper set of hardware relevant to your use for unistrut than there is for EMT. (Probably because unistrut is designed to hold thing whereas the EMT universe of hardware is more designed for holding EMT to other things)
Last month I spent about 100 hours learning to MIG weld to create a giant mushroom art piece for a music festival. I had looked at Maker Pipe as an option, and it was very compelling. Slow and expensive shipping to Canada and the lack of discounting for large numbers of components pushed back. I would still love to try these, I just hope they manage to get distributors in markets outside the US.
One of the most important lessons I've learned in all my time building things, is that it's very often the mechanical and physical construction that makes or breaks a project.
Electronics and software are pretty forgiving, but bad mechanical design directly translated to a bad product and a bad experience building it. I love to see progress in that aspect of DIY!
I know this is meant for EMT, but these look a lot like chainlink fence end-rail clamps which go for about $2.50 a piece. The post material (galvanized 1-3/4” pipe) goes for about $2.50 per foot, so those could be a reasonable alternative for when you can’t get easy access to EMT or maker pipe shipped to you.
What you probably need to look for is "structural pipe" - Lowes and HD both carry a line of that with lots of fittings, and KeeKlamp and others are available online or from trade supply shops.
https://makerpipe.com/collections/modular-pipe-fittings/prod...
edit: I did not even see when I posted this that they had made this open source with the downloadable STL to print your own connectors. Great move on them!