I'm about to do my first neck reset and have most of the equipment pulled together.
I made a needle and picked up a garage sale cappuccino machine. I picked up a piece of high pressure fuel line at Lowes. The temp rating was the same as their heater hose.
Attachment:
Steam Source.jpg
I did a short test of my setup. Before I go much farther here, I'll just say that I didn't let things explode and I shut it off when I saw that things were not going all that great. Initially things were working out great.
My two concerns were leaks from the needle that I made and if the hose would hold up. I let the cappuccino machine run until it was done spitting water and was shooting steam.
Attachment:
Needle and Steam.jpg
At this point things were looking good. I let it run like that for a bit and the hose started to balloon up. I shut the machine down and let it cool.
Attachment:
Post Steam Test.jpg
You can see in both of these pictures right at the needle where there is a bulge. The hose is physically fatter than it had been. I'm sure if I had let it go for mush longer that it would have split and burst a cloud of high pressure steam all over the place.
So lesson one.....Fuel line isn't the right hose.
Lesson two..... just because something is rated the same as it is for another application, don't assume it will work the same.
I headed to the auto parts stores and all they have in the 1/4" size is Fuel line. I had actually been to the auto parts stores before, but was hoping I could find some that had some out of the box suggestion. They sent me to NAPA. I went to NAPA and they had a better selection of hose, but the heater hose was only rated to 200 degrees and they didn't have any in 1/4" ID. They had some hydraulic hose which would work in all regards except that it is overkill and you cant crimp it with a hose clamp.
So I'm wondering what people are using for this. This could be one of those situations where I should have just gone straight to Stew Mac and been done with it.
