A cut piece of pipe is thirty seconds of saw time and twenty minutes of rework. This book is about getting the number right the first time, and about the thirty-second check that proves it - with a tape and a framing square, on the layout table, before anything is committed.
The geometry was calculated by one program and independently checked by a second. The second one does not know the first one's formulas: it rebuilds the pipe run as vectors in space, adds them, and measures where the far end lands. Across every worked example the two close on each other to better than a ten-trillionth of an inch. Figures printed as tape fractions are rounded separately to the nearest sixteenth, and manufacturer-dependent dimensions are marked as values to confirm on the fitting.
What is inside
How it is written
Every chapter opens on a job, works it in plain language, shows the drawing, and closes with a check you can do in thirty seconds. Thirty-eight chapters, thirty-three dimensioned figures, and no chapter that needs the one before it if you are standing at the pipe with a problem.
What it does not do
It does not replace the job drawings, the line specification, the welding procedure or the code. Where a dimension comes from a catalog rather than from geometry, this book says so and shows you how to get it off the fitting in thirty seconds. One table came out of the book entirely: three catalogs gave three different answers, so Chapter 4 shows you how to take that dimension off the fitting with a straightedge and a tape.
For pipefitters, steamfitters, welders, sprinkler fitters, apprentices, and anybody who has to turn a drawing into a cut length.