I have this old ball valve that I would like to replace but not sure what was the usual arrangement 20 years ago... I am hoping to minimise work as much as possible
Is "2" turn-able? or actually welded dead to "1"? Because I tried to turn 2 but 1 (the pipe) is also start twisting
Any recommendation on which to turn and counter force it?
I'm thinking to to turn 3 and provide counter force on 2 and 4
P.S. This is merely cold water connection (e.g. not gas)
That is a mess. 2 does not turn. Turning 3 counter clockwise (as viewed from above) will unscrew from the valve, but try to screw into the fitting #2, therefore being usless.
There are 3 solutions :
Cut the copper pipe and attach the needed fittings to a new valve and solder it together.
The other method would be cutting the pipes and adding in unions to attach a new valve.
If the valve works, leave it alone.
Obviously it's hard to tell from pics, but it's possible 2 (and its counterpart below the valve) are soldered or welded onto the pipe. 3 might be a union, which has reverse threads on one end to allow two pipes to be drawn together without either of them having to rotate. This may be difficult to deal with solo...if you can recruit an extra hand, you'd want to use two hands/wrenches to hold 2 and 4, while another hand/wrench turns 3. You will need to remove some of the pipe tape to expose some threads, to see which direction it should unscrew in—you don't want to just tighten it.
What kind of fluid is this valve controlling, BTW? I assume you have some other way of cutting off the supply to the valve.
If both ends of the piping are fixed, you may have to cut it out, add a new piece of copper tubing to make up list length, and sweat-solder your new valve into place. This looks to me like a case of someone using adapters so they could solder in the valve they had in hand /, rather than using a threaded valve because they actually wanted to be able to disassemble it
You could probably get away with cutting one side free, unscrewing the other, and using another threaded valve with a soldering adapter attached on the end you're going to resolder, nut I'm not convinced that is any improvement over just getting a soldered-in valve body.
Quick tip: Sweating pipe is MUCH less stressful with an instant-on/instant-off torch. If you haven't sweated pipe before, getting a foot or two of pipe and a few cheap connectors will let you practice before doing it for real. Critical steps are cleaning the surface adequately and getting the joint hot enough before applying solder. There are lots of good videos on the net to learn from.
