Dewalt and Milwaukee copper swage tool

gator

Hi all, so I am looking at both the dewalt swage tool and dewalt pex expander tool. I can’t see why you couldn’t use the pex A expansion tool to also swage copper …. Anyone have experience these tools and why that wouldn’t work?
I could make an argument on not using the swage tool to expand pex cause maybe the tool doesn’t expand pex to a specific dead nuts number to hold the fitting for years - but with copper your going to solder it so as long as it’s expanded by the pex expander enough to get the fitting in the pipe you should be good - right?

GGross

well i imagine the heads for copper swage and the heads for pex expansion probably don't fit on the same tool since the 2 tools are different. I wouldn't expect to be able to use a pex expander head to accurately swage copper because the ID of these nominal pipe sizes are different between copper and pex, you going to fill in a 1/4" gap with solder? talk about a messy install, and you can't just cut it off early it won't be well rounded or evenly swaged. I could see attempting to use the swage tool on pex but I doubt it will get it to expand enough to get over the fittings since the diameter that the swage tool is targeting is smaller, with Pex the pipe is going to contract back to normal shape so the tool expands the tubing much larger than it really needs to be. Seems like a hassle and for most pros not worth the trouble.

I would also add that if you ever cut open an expanded piece of pex it leaves a very clear mark on the tubing, it's very rough and not meant to be a clean expansion like you would want with swaging

mattmia2

I suspect the force to expand pex is a lot less than the force to swage copper. Also pex is very elastic, you have to over expand it a lot to get a given finished id, copper is fairly mailable, it is going to stay at close the maximum diameter you stretch it too. Basically i think the curve of the force and the dimensions of both are very different.