tiny plastic tubing source

Clippard makes a full line of tubing like that in various materials.

Jim

You might check chemical or chromatographic supply houses. Fisher Scientific, VWR, Supleco, Cole-Parmer or Alltech are good places to start. You might also try calling McMaster-Carr and see if they can special it for you.

FWIW, that tubing might be very cheap even from those sources. We needed some 1/8 OD x 1/32 ID Teflon tubing at work a while back and a coil ran us around $200, AIR.

What material is it made of? I assume it gets hot, and so teflon is likely.

It sounds like "spaghetti" tubing intended for insulating bare wire might work if nested.

The traditional manufacturer is Alpha. For example, Alpha TFT-250-18 is made of teflon, has an ID of 0.042", walls 0.016" thick, so OD is

Anyway, such tubing can be bought for the above dollars from the usual electronic component distributors, like Newark and Allied.

One can also get clear PVC tubing, such as Alpha PVC-105-18 et al, for about the same money, but in a wider variety of sizes.

Alpha may well make the very heavy walled tubing used in the tweeco; a call to Alpha should tell the story.

Try Small Parts, Inc.:

- Michael

McMaster but

I don't have any on hand so I can't check the sizes, but take a look at the plastic tubing used for vacuum lines on most auto engines...

The liner is usually PTFE, and is available from MSC. It's chemical hosing.

LLoyd

The tweeco stuff is brown in color if that helps identify the material.

--If you're going to run miles of wire thru this I suspect you'll want a very special kind of tubing. One guy I know, who does robotics with multiple cable runs, uses a teflon tube which seems to be relatively immune to wear from braided steel cables. I think it comes from MSC but not sure.

---------------------------------------------------- Small Parts Inc. has all kinds of small ID plastic tubing

Don't let the facts interfere with your prejudices

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Usually, I just lurk, soaking up all of the good info. This time, I may be able to help.

The clue was the brown color. Perhaps what you have is PEEK (polyetheretherketone) tubing. Tough, fairly hard and has a working temperature range from -480 deg F to +480 deg F. Cool stuff, albeit, pretty expensive and exotic. It could also be high temp polyimide, which is also pricey, from a relative standpoint. Both types are listed in McMaster-Carr, although not at the specific size that you mentioned. A 0.125" OD x 0.062 ID PEEK tubing is listed for around $6 /ft and is indicated as a rigid tubing. The aforementioned Small Parts has the same size listed as "semi-flexible" for around $20 for a 3 foot piece. A wider selection may be available from other vendors.

Hope that helps, David Glos

Dang, that _is_ cold, it's good for 20.33 degrees _below_ absolute zero? I wonder how they test that...

very carefully.

I would imagine shrinkage would be a real problem at that point.

Worm holes

Gunner

"At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child - miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic and useless. Liberalism is a philosphy of sniveling brats." -- P.J. O'Rourke

Umm, considering my background in engineering, I really should have caught that. BLUSH! I certainly deserved that raz.

Another ref lists the melting point as 633 deg F and max working temp as 482 deg F. No lower limit listed.

You can see a photo and a little more infor at

I used to work with cryogens (liquid helium, at 4.7 Kelvin) so it kind of caught my eye...

Cool...thanks.

Dave Hinz

Maybe 4.2K?

How do you get stuff to work when it's so hot?

Jim

You're gonna go make me look that up, aren't you? (hangs head in shame) My bad. Wonder how I screwed that up?

Well, it's left-handed Helium, of course.

Well, some magnets do work at the critical point, which I think is 8 or 9 degrees. Maybe the ones you worked with ran well above atmospheric pressure, to keep air out of the system. That would raise it up above 4.2...

Jim