My house is due for some plumbing work and I have decided to go with copper pipe for said work. The thing is I am garbage at soft soldering copper. I never do it so I’m awful at judging the temp and I hate dealing with flux. On the other hand I’m a refrigeration mechanic so brazing copper pipe is my bread and butter. I could practically make a good leak free braze joint with my eyes closed. Also, considering most of the plumbing will be copper to copper connections, I could just use silphos filler rod and not have to worry about flux for most of it. I know brazed joints are not standard for water pipe but I already have the tools, the skill set, and I don’t see any way it could be worse than soft solder. Sure it’s overkill but is there any other reason I shouldn’t just braze my water pipes?
The same is actually true of a lot of refrigeration components as well. You just wrap a wet strip of rag around the pipe to act as a heat barier between where you’re brazing and the sensitive component. As long as the rag stays wet (which it will unless you go really slow) then heat won’t significantly propogate past that point. Just doing that can let you braze a joint within 1" of a plastic component as long as you’re careful where you point the torch.
I meant soldering/brazing directly to the shower valve. Which you can do when soldering, I’m no expert on brazing though.
I’m not sure about shower valves in particular but I have devinitely brazed directly to regular nylon core plumbing ball valves before by using the rag trick.in that case you just wrap the valve itself with the wet rag.