At the risk of stating the obvious, building big things can be difficult. Sure, parts that fit on the bed of a 3D printer are easy to make, if not particularly fast, and scaling up from there is possible. But if you need a long beam or structural element, printing makes little sense; better to buy than build in that case. The trouble then becomes, how do you attach such parts together?
Enter Makerpipe. This South Carolina company, recently out of a crowdfunding campaign, makes a range of structural connectors and fittings for electrical mechanical tubing, or EMT, the galvanized steel conduit used in the electrical trades. EMT is widely available in multiple sizes and is relatively cheap, although we have noticed that the price here has ticked up quite a bit over the last couple of years. It also has the advantage of being available off-the-shelf at any big-box home improvement store, meaning you have instant access to a fantastic building material.
Makerpipe’s bolt-together couplings let you turn pieces of EMT, easily cut with a hacksaw or pipe cutter, into structures without the need for welding. Yes, you can do the same with extruded aluminum, but even if you’re lucky enough to live near a supply house that carries extrusions and the necessary fittings and is open on Saturday afternoon, you’ll probably pay through the nose for it.
Makerpipe isn’t giving their stuff away, and while we normally don’t like to feature strictly commercial products, something that makes building large structures easier and faster seems worth sharing with our community. We’ve done our share of fabricobbling together EMT structures after all, and would have killed for fittings like these.
MakerPipe is not as new as you think. They go back a few years now. 2019 first post on the MakerPipe blog. If you look at the Maker Pipe YT channel, the first videos are 8 years ago
I’ve buckled conduit so many times messing around with making tents and shelves out of it.
Wood is nice, you can hold it together with screws. I think it’s $15 for a box of 100 wood screws.
The fittings look pretty cool though. Remind me of some of the old bike frame fittings you could get if you were into brazing together your own frame. (not from galvanized, but just mild steel tube)
This looks very much like the FlowTube Steel system that is on the market for decades.
https://flowstore.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/FlowTube-Design-and-Assembly-Guide.pdf
yep we have all sorts of light duty racks and stuff made out of that stuff
Yeah, I was going to pipe [sic] up too. I remember seeing this stuff in the 1970s. People built awnings, sheds and similar things with it, using corrugated fiberglass or iron sheet. Cheap, but structurally pretty iffy, as I recall.
I have 2 concerns,
1. EMT isn’t very strong, in that it isn’t made to be structural.
2. Terminating the EMT without physical contact with the other pipe seems to lose the weight bearing capacity of the joint.
If you filled the tube with a cement-soaked rope, or just packed sand, it would be considerably more resistant to buckling.
The main problem with systems like this is that inexperienced builders are likely to underestimate the need for bracing and overestimate the length of unsupported span you can get away with. They probably have good documentation, but even if people read it, they’ll assume it’s a con to sell more hardware.
If everyone using this read up on truss design first, I’m sure it would make for easy, cheap, durable structures. That’s a big “if” though.