I have a vaguely soldering-related story.
Years ago when I was in high school my buddies and I were big into "stunt" shows like Travis Pastrana's Nitro Circus, Fantasy Factory, stuff like that. We'd do longboarding, got these "drift trikes" we'd take down hills, connected a couple of bikes together with 2x4s and called it the "death quad" and rode it down hills, all that stuff. Logically the next step was going to be to ramp through our own ring of fire.
So we got to brainstorming. None of us being particularly experienced whatsoever in plumbing gas line/piping we figured copper pipe would be the easiest thing to work with. (Really it was going to be more of an "octagon of fire" rather than a "ring of fire" cuz angles seemed easier than curves) None of us also had any experience with sweating copper, but I was the "experienced" solderer of the group, so that duty fell to me. By "experienced" I mean that at this point I think I had built one BYOC pedal kit (a DOD 250 that I tried to drive a solid-state crate with and thought it sounded godawful) and had figured out how to solder a 1/8" jack to my car stereo's tape cassette input to give it a ghetto aux port.
The church we went to had a fairly well equipped maintenance shop at the time so that's where we set up home base. Bought the copper pipe and drilled holes all along one side of it, with the intention being that this is where the fire would spray out of. I set to work trying to heat the copper pipe enough with a $5 radio shack soldering iron to get the solder to melt (at this point I just figured soldering was soldering and didn't really understand how a huge pipe like that was never going to heat up enough with a little 15 watt iron or whatever it was). Eventually tracked down a blowtorch and actually got it put together in a fairly acceptable manner.
At this point we figured for "safety" we better do a leak test. The church had some pretty high-powered smoke machines so the thinking was that we'd attach the hazer's output nozzle to the "ring" of fire and see if the smoke came out anywhere it wasn't supposed to. We rigged up a contraption with some flexible hose and a funnel meant to seal the hazer nozzle and feed into the fire-ring.
Of course this did not remotely work whatsoever. The seal around the hazer was no good and the seal around the fire-ring was no good and given that we'd already drilled a hundred holes for the fire to come out of, it was pretty much impossible to tell if there were any "leaks," as it pretty much all looked like leaks. Next issue was that after running the hazer on full blast for quite some time it got extremely foggy/smoky in there. This ended up setting off the fire alarms, and when the alarms there went off it automatically would notify the local fire department and they would immediately dispatch a response team if they didn't hear from anyone to cancel the call. We were not aware of this arragement so of course didn't call to say it was clear. Being a pretty large building they went ahead and sent a LOT of fire trucks, like full response.
And somewhere along the way someone had snapped a photo of us testing out the whole rig, which somehow made it to the local news media. So the local news was reporting about this big fire department response to our church which ended up being a false alarm, and to go along with it they had a photo of a bunch of high schoolers surrounded by haze and smoke and holding up this giant ring of fire that was billowing smoke and attached to what looked like a giant beer bong. It looked a little suspect, to say the least. Needless to say the church was not anything too pleased with this publicity and the project was scrapped and we more or less had our "Shop priveleges" revoked for a bit after that. But it's probably for the best as our plan for the fire ring was basically just to attach a propane tank with a hose to our fire-ring and light it on fire with no plans for any kind of safety valves or shutoffs so we probably would've blown ourselves up or something had it gotten much further along
But my first time soldering copper pipe was really not too shabby if I do say so myself.
. Best thing ever invented for TIG welders.
