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I have heard it is a good idea to fill the heatercore with water so that you don't run any risk of desoldering the fins from the core. Personally, I would be surprised if anyone applied THAT much heat, but better safe than sorry I suppose.
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Unless you have one hell of a torch thats not going to work. The solder doesn't flow until its way above the boiling point of water. Which means you'll have to boil all the water out first.
Same reason you have to drain a pipe before you can solder a new fitting to a T.
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that aces hardware must be something, every time i read a how-to article somewhere, they always say, grab that n that at ace's, half of that stuff, i never find.
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Aces is awesome. Theres about 30 in Tucson as best I can tell. Every 2 miles theres a store with all the fittings you could ever want. Ditto for Autozones, I pass 2 autozones and three 3 aces on my way to work over the summer.
Still for really rare stuff you need to goto a plumbing supply store. I'm sure they have these in Europe/where ever as well. Its not like theres no pipes there.
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so if i want to step up from 3/8 to 1/2; i need to order some stuff over the internet; unbelievable
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1/2 is a common household pipe size. There will be places that sell the stuff. I'd check the phone book. I've never seen a place that cared if you were a plumber or not, so long as you got money.
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Clean copper, apply flux, heat, solder.
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Don't skimp on the cleaning part. Really. When I was making a compressed propane flame thrower way back, I didn't clean the copper well enough and one of my joints came a part effortlessly as soon as I put ~20 PSI into it. I looked afterwords and it had a line were some spot on the copper hadn't been able to solder. I can just imagine this happening on a watercooled comp with awful results.
If its just one or two fittings, fine grain sand paper (150 or so is fine) is good enough. More and you should spend $6 for a pipe brush. Much safer if you're doing lots of pipe.
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Anyone know got some nice information or useful links on the subject of soldering copper?
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Get your dad to help you out. Its the only way to learn. What I did was follow a plumber around for a few hours. Makes all the difference.