Aussiedistiller, Home Distilling, Moonshine, Home Brew

Gud day,
just thought I would put my success... then in turn me completely messing it all up because I got greedy :) I have made plenty of things using my braising torch and actually through I was pretty good with it until now !!!
Tools:
oxy acetylene kit
2" plate steel punch
Grinder
Jigsaw
Some others, as needed.

Consumables I used were:
Harris Safety-Silv 56 56% Silver Solder Brazing Alloy
Harris Stay-Silv Silver Soldering Flux White Paste for Hi Temperature
Many Grinding, cutting and flapper disks
A few stainless steel jigsaw blades ( strangely only needed 2, these things lasted a lot better than I thought they would)
time, and lots of it once i took on the completely unnecessary second 1/2 of the project....

Materials
2x 50l kegs .. was assured they were legal, but I question now weather that was because they were in some way cracked / faulty.
2" ferrules
6" ferrule

ok, so started on my first keg, and couldn't for the life of my get the spear out, killed 3 bits and decided i may need some properer bits for this after cutting out it out... too large for my 6" ferrule.
Grabbed some nice bits from eh hardware and sorted the second drum in minutes, ready to weld the first 6"ferrule.

welded into place

braised into place and cleaned up a little, pulling the 2" fill port.


braised

Cleaned up, ready for my element ports...

Element ports



all done, needed a little cleaning, polishing and a pressure test. too easy.... however the second drub was bothering me there....

the beginning of the end...

and the point of no return :crying-blue:

First join, feeling pretty chuffed with myself at this point...

Second join... kept getting that damn BANG 5-10 min after finishing the weld

the dreaded confirmation of a crack....

Eventually after going around +- 6 times, nice and slowly, heating evenly using flux as needed, and bearing in mind the other join was first time lucky, and getting the same sickening result every time.
I ended up strapping the barrel together length ways, as I had done for the initial weld on both joins, thinking that it may help and ended up-with a bigger bang on cooling... and yes, I was adding s#$# loads of rod by now thinking more would hold... What a waste of such good rods :crying-blue:

So at this stage, and after spending more time than I should have threw in the towel, wrote the time and money off as school fees and bought a nice shiny 5l boiler from our trusty supplier... my reason for building a 100 was to speed things up as my time is limited. I love to tinker, but am obviously missing something with this second join, less room to flex I guess as both sides are now joined??

So I guess the moral of the story... STOP while you are ahead, and don't be greedy !!!

Or get it welded properly with a TIG :-B

Agreed, I recon a tig is my next big investment :) ... Need a few birthdays, xmas etc....

Got a mate with one or an engineering shop close?

A Mig will be fine, people have even stick (arc) welded them.

Wondering is hard solder strong enough for the rest of the fittings, joining the kegs aside?

hard vs soft ? it seems pretty unbreakable where it has taken, even on the first joint.

dastiller wrote:hard vs soft ? it seems pretty unbreakable where it has taken, even on the first joint.

As apposed to tigging the fittings. Wondering if hard solder is strong enough to hold the weight of a 4" flute.. Would be interested in making myself a boiler if I could hard solder it. No tig or ability to tig, especially a sanitary weld. If hard solder is up to the job I would give it a go..

The thing to remember is the difference between solder and weld. Weld is joining the two metals with and arc and filler which can create a joint equal in strength to the parent material. Solder is just another version of a hot glue gun. I've seen shit welds and great solder jobs but they don't compare. Thats from a Boily who tolerates having to weld. Love makin shit but hate welding.

About to solder a 4" ferrule in the top of a 25L stainless keg to be used for storing/oaking spirits (needs a larger opening for removing the oak dominoes) , cut the hole with a 95mm bimetal hole saw taking it very slow and using plenty of cutting fluid. The cutting fluid was made up with water and 2stroke oil mix.

I use Harris Staybrite silver solder and StayBrite #8 solder, the #8 is better for gap filling. Watch out for the flux fumes as they can be a little toxic. The Harris Staybrite is easy to use and doesn't require a lot of heat.

The links below show some soldering techniques using this solder.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIkvP55UbxM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhZM6yGf7iw

My 50l tested perfectly before I cut it to make the 100l, I recon it would have held together perfectly long term. Loads of people soldering ferrules with success on the internet. I was dealing with some mad stress there, as the split barrel shows.

I reckon soldering a ferrule into a keg would be easier as the hole you cut in a keg will be solid as it is one piece.

Soldering two kegs together would be more difficult as they will never be exactly the same shape and the heating then cooling will distort.

I am with bushy, I wouldn't trust it to hold anything substantial and clearly you have proven the limits of this method.

Just an update and to confirm the above, I removed the ferrules, which took some pretty serious heating and force, and simply hit the kegs apart with a few heavy hammer blows. so... i would use for ferrules in the future, but not to join actual kegs.

Could you use something like this to keep the kegs shaped the same, while you weld it?

If you can't tell, it is metal strap with holes in it (to weld through) welded to some sort of clamp to tighten it all temporarily.

As the kegs are made from cold rolling SS sheet there is a tendency to distort some what which is more pronounced the further you are from the base/top. This is compounded further with the application of heat when trying to join.

When mine was made it took a lot of time to marry the two pieces together, tack them in place, move further around align track and so on to align the two halves. Wouldn't recommend doing so and joining with anything less then tig welding if you want it to hold together and look half decent.