What Grades of Copper Tubing Are Flexible?
Annealed is More Flexible Than Drawn
Most annealed copper tubing is flexible enough to be bent by hand. It is especially easy easier to bend annealed tubing with a hand bender. Tubing with 1/8" to 5/8" outside dimensions should not pose any significant bending problems when bending by hand or with simple tube benders. Larger outside dimensions and/or significantly thicker tube walls will influence the difficulty one will experience while bending! These larger, stronger tubes are far less flexible and will require industrial tube bending services (such as those offered by our Company Group) to facilitate.
About Annealing for More Flexible Tubes
Without becoming too technical, annealing simply changes the temper of the tubing to give it a different feel and strength. For copper, the "annealed" designation indicates that the tube is much more flexible and easy to manipulate. Usually the process of annealing involves repeated exposure to heat and cold with very precise forging (manufacturing) technologies.
Flexible Copper Tubing Grades
The following types of copper tubing are available in hard drawn (what you do not want) and annealed (otherwise called "soft") copper tubing. If you plan on bending the tubes en masse, make sure you buy a small quantity of similar tubing from an online retailer such as Amazon.com first before you invest in a large quantity of tubing. If you jump the gun, you may find that the tube was not as flexible as you expected and need some serious manufacturing bending power!
Most thin wall B 75 annealed copper tubing with a wall thickness of .045 should not be a problem, but check some of our soft copper tubing products.
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Get Your Copper Tubing Products Manufactured to Print by the Copper Tube Coils Group!
Flexible or not, perhaps you are in the process of developing a product. If so, consider ordering your tubing products formed and manufactured to print.