Widening The Pathway part two

As documented here, after moving the water heater, the bottle neck in the workshop is the ridiculous gas line:

Safety first: after shutting the gas off at the meter, I lit one of the burners at kitchen stove and used up the residual gas in the pipes....and proved the supply was really off. Then I disconnected the flexible lines at the furnace and water heater; both the flexible lines are new and can be re-used. Building code in California requires at least eighteen (18) inches of flexible pipe adjacent to every appliance and there is a good reason for this.* 

I considered cutting out the old pipe with the screaming wheel of death, but it was safer just to unscrew it back to the T-piece. I actually started this project on a Friday morning before a weekend when Amy Sheep and the three little sheep were elsewhere - my thinking was that if I screwed up, I would have three days to get professional help!

Obviously I planned in advance which fittings to buy, but I was still a bit nervous about installing them correctly and getting the aligned where I wanted. 

I put a temporary strap on the horizontal section; the finished pipe will stand on the floor and make the strap redundant.

Like so, as they used to say on Blue Peter:

The pipe came out a quarter of an inch short, so I shimmed it with a a scrap of wood. I might make a more aesthetically pleasing spacer in the future.

This is later after I attached the two independent spurs which go to the appliances. This photo was taken before I was done pressure testing the system; once that was done, I reconnected the gas supply at the meter and reignited the pilot flame at the water heater. The furnace is electronic ignition, but we only need that a couple of months of the year at the most, so I typically leave it off. 

Much better! You could fit a double decker bus through there now:

*It's called earthquakes....