I have a 6ft pipe. I want to insert it into a hollow wall with an inside measurement of 3 1/2". The pipe is 1/2" id plush 1/16 thickness sides for a total of 5/8 Diameter. What is the shortest I could possible make the slot the 6ft pipe would be sliding into?? I can’t find A or C on the triangle.
Draw a picture. I’m not sure what you’re asking.
If the pipe is going perpendicular to the wall, you only need a hole the OD of the pipe.
Assuming I understand the question correctly, I just drew this up in CAD and I get 16.81" with no clearance allowed. So a 17" slot should give you enough play.
Maybe you could sketch it up yourself if you have access to some drawing program or perhaps someone else could confirm so I don’t lead you astray.
(The critical points I found are both on the inside surface of the wall, so it doesn’t appear that the wall panel thickness comes into play.)
I did a rough sketch and it appears to me that the wall thickness would come into play where the top end of the pipe hits the wall when starting to insert pipe. Drawing out on graph paper I can get a close enough to work with answer but I keep thinking I should be able to do it just with what I know about the pipe and the wall.
I was just coming back to say I was wrong about the wall thickness. You are right. My answer assumed a 0.25" thick wall.
Increasing the wall thickness to 0.50" increases the minimum slot to 20.27", so it has an appreciable effect.
If you know the actual wall panel thickness I can tell you what I measure.
Actual wall thickness will likely be closer to 1" thick
I measure 25.99" for a 1" wall panel thickness.
I’m trying to solve it with geometry too just for fun. I’ve got the distance from the bottom of the pipe to the far cut and the angle of the pipe at that point. That much just requires Pythagorean two times and tan x = opp/adj.
Trying to figure out the location of the cut near to the bottom of the pipe.
BTW - I was able to determine the answer using just geometry/simple trig and it matched what I drew in CAD exactly. I can write it out if you’re still interested.
Sounds like the point my math education got curtailed. My biggest regret in life is not pursuing mathematics further.
For the sake of completeness I wanted to mention that if the pipe is to end up resting at the elevation of the floor, the top of the slot has to be a bit higher than the 72" height of the pipe.
The top of the slot would have to be about 72.04" above the floor and the bottom of the slot could be 25.99" below that.
This is because when the pipe is at the angle to slide into the slot the near side bottom of the pipe is lower than the far side bottom of the pipe.
Just eyeballing this with no actual calculations, it seems to me that you would need a ceiling (or equivalent height inside the wall) of nearly ten feet above the floor. The bottom of the slot is close to four feet up, so to get the base of the pipe in, the top will be close to six feet above that. Yes, the pipe is tilted, but not a lot.
Thanks for a good answer. I actually recently had some plumbing done and felt the holes could have been smaller. It got me thinking about this problem.