The hose bib at my parents' place hasn't been working for quite some time so I wanted to try my hand at replacing it with a frost-free sillcock. While water only dribbles out when the faucet is opened, the shut-off valve looks very corroded and I believe there's a blockage inside that is causing no flow; maybe the stem broke off inside.
The existing line for the outdoor spigot starts as 3/4" and is reduced to 1/2" right before the shut-off. So there's about 2' of 1/2" piping between the reducer and the hose bib outside.
The problem is that the hole in the wall is offset about 1.75" horizontally and 0.5" vertically to the rest of the line, and it looks like when it was originally installed, the plumber had bent the pipe to make the connection. Is it feasible for me to make a bend in some hard copper (type L) I already have? I watched a few videos on annealing hard copper and thought a minor offset like this one would be okay to do. I know I could probably do it with a couple of 45-deg elbows but I would imagine the fewer couplings I need to solder, the better.
Lastly, would I see any significant difference in flow rate just cutting out the entire 1/2" section and making the final connection to the sillcock a continuous 3/4"? I've been researching whether or not it would actually make a difference, given that the connected water meter is 5/8" (wouldn't this be the flow rate limiting factor for the rest of the house?), the 1/2" section is only about 2' long (I believethe reducer definitely does decrease flow rate but I'm not sure to what extent due to the short distance), and the sillcock opening's bore size is already supposed to be small anyway (correct me if I'm wrong, but apparently the valve bore for a standard hose bib with 1/2" inlet is generally the same size as one with a 3/4" inlet - about 5/16" or so, so wouldn't flow rate also be limited due to this factor?), but haven't found a definite answer.