Accu-Flare Flaring Tool

At Diversitech, I was tasked with completing the design for a tool called the Accu-Flare, which was to flare different sizes of copper pipe in HVAC applications. The tool presses a cone into the opening of a copper tube, flaring it out. The flaring tool needed to be compact, lightweight, handle multiple sizes of copper tubing, and most importantly, accept a 1/4” drive from a drill for fast flaring.

The last requirement proved to be the trickiest. The tool had a clutch plate so that over-tightening the spindle into the copper wouldn’t seize at the bottom and spin the pipe in an unsafe manner. The clutch also allowed for reversing the drill and unthreading the conical head from the copper workpiece.

I needed to design a new handle for the tool as well, one that showed off all the industrial design built into the hilmor tool brand. To make sure the 1/4” drive at the bottom of the handle wouldn’t break off from the force of shaping copper, I did a simple Finite Element Analysis (FEA) study using Solidworks Simulation.

The FEA showed that this feature needed to be much stronger, and therefore resulted in the handle being split into two pieces: a handle and an insert with the 1/4” drive, rather than just a single piece cast part.

First, I wanted to find the optimum angle for the ramps on the clutch. Using a trusty Free Body Diagram, I came up with an equation that solved for the angle on the clutch relative to the forces acting on it.

From here, I was able to find the best angle for the teeth on the clutch plate so that the drill would only slip when the copper pipes were fully flared.