My First Still. PICS PICS PICS!!!!!!

by **tehsaeas** » Thu Dec 13, 2012 8:41 pm

My very first Still build and it has been quite some time welding stainless so i hope it turns out alright,

First here are some materials,

2 pounds of copper mesh from the USA.
30M of copper hose for cheap.
Stainless steel Keg.
Tri clamp
Stainless steel tube. 2' x 1.6mm 2m long.
some more stainless on the floor, 2.2m laying in the shed it is 1.5 inch i think. may have to make something out of it later.
and brew shop heating element..... I know I know but it was there and cheap. Can't hemp the impulse buys.

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first of all did a bit of welding and machining and welded a stronger wider tube to the top of my keg that the reflux will mount to. i also machined up a spigot that holds the element beautifully. no sealing problems as the silacone washer has no where to go and gets crushed against the element and a flat surface.

tested it all out and no leaks and it works a treat. only thing is that i could not boil 45lt of water, it only reached a max of 98 Celsius will deal with that later.

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Slant plate setup next so cutting the stainless pipe, and in the background you can see one of the ends welded on for the tri clamp. i was able to machine them up out of scrap. cheaper and quicker then buying although i could not say the same for the tri clamp itself.

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Now my first ever go at making a condenser, only single wound but at 31cm long it should do the job and it has really good flow. I toyed with the idea of a double coil but the bend would have been that much that the copper would not allow any where as much water through. will try with a different diameter copper next time and try the double wound design.

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here is the un packed 1.5m tube waiting for the copper. 1.5m :D :D :D :D :D bolted to the keg and the tri clamp holding the top piece on with the condenser.

Can you guess what is missing.? the most important part i think.

Suggestions for what i should do there as i have so many ideas i do not know where to start. KISS maybe

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and i just found out you can only upload 5 photos per post. :D

Cheers.

by **mullamulla** » Thu Dec 13, 2012 8:49 pm

Nice work so far dude :handgestures-thumbupleft:

by **ilanrl** » Thu Dec 13, 2012 8:51 pm

Nice !

I love shiny Stainless. Its so sad when you have to cover it all up with insulation! (Which is what i recommend you do to the boiler.)

Amazing how much heat leaks out of big boiling vessels- usually a bit of insulation is the difference between no boiling and a strong rolling boil.

perhaps this is the time I have my rant about how stainless is no better an insulator than copper for our purposes .... :ugeek: :ugeek: :ugeek:

lou

by **googe** » Thu Dec 13, 2012 8:55 pm

Awesome mate :handgestures-thumbupleft: you have good skills by the look of it :mrgreen: should be a nice looking rig when your done. Good luck finishing it off.

Cheers

by **tehsaeas** » Fri Dec 14, 2012 10:34 pm

So just out of curiosity i assembled my beast and turned it on with 45lt of water.

ilanrl wrote: love shiny Stainless. Its so sad when you have to cover it all up with insulation! (Which is what i recommend you do to the boiler.)

Amazing how much heat leaks out of big boiling vessels- usually a bit of insulation is the difference between no boiling and a strong rolling boil.

Car sun shade inside out with a bit of tape made this thing roar. :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D

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And here was the pic of my needle valve and cooling pipes.
One thing i have learnt already is that clear tube does not have any integrity at all when it is either under pressure or gets hot so first thing in the morning i am going to get some garden hose and plumb it in.

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Any other suggestions with things i may have overlooked?

Now i need to make my first ever wash up.. Down to Springvale i go to buy sugar by the 20kg bag. :D

by **crow** » Fri Dec 14, 2012 10:53 pm

well little hard to tell but is that a brass gas needle valve with a plastic take off hose. If it is a gas valve it might have something like 8% lead your choice but be aware ethanol is a pretty neat solvent and if the take off line is plastic, (again hard to tell) i think you could do a hell of a lot better for the same reason

by **MacStill** » Fri Dec 14, 2012 10:56 pm

Good call crow :handgestures-thumbupleft:

I'd be looking at at least changing the take off hose, you could prolly pickle the valve and be fine :handgestures-thumbupleft:

by **haze** » Sat Dec 15, 2012 9:15 pm

shes a tall bitch :)

i bought food grade clear hose for my still. it was a mistake. The booze fully stripped chemicals outa the hose. First batch of booze had this nylex taste like you were drinking straight from the end of a brand new garden hose.

ditched the booze and the clear hosing, copper all the way now.

Also I did the same thing with insulation as you. I just bought a roll of duct tape and went around the keg to finish it off. stop liquids getting trapped between insulation and ended up looking neater.

Ive only done about 8 runs on my still and i have same heating elements as you. When they go bang you will know about it. One of mine went last week and scared the shit outa me. My face was less than a metre from it at the time

by **tehsaeas** » Sat Dec 15, 2012 10:37 pm

haze wrote:Also I did the same thing with insulation as you. I just bought a roll of duct tape and went around the keg to finish it off. stop liquids getting trapped between insulation and ended up looking neater.

This morning i put on the insulation tape as well. looks nice and shiny. Then i put my insulation foam on the packed part of the column and wrapped that up in shiny insulation tape also.

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McStill wrote: you could prolly pickle the valve and be fine

All pickled on the inside and taken care of so no worries there. just deciding how to do the take off valve with a condenser. probably won't make anything too flash as it only needs to get from the needle valve into whatever i am collecting the stuff in.

And last but not least here are my first 2 batches of normal sugar wash. will see how it turns out in a week or so :D Running out of room in my garage so i am having to use my half built CNC router as a table :(

A mans shed is never big enough!!

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Hopefully i will have come up with a take off idea before the end of the weekend.

by **Goldie** » Fri Dec 21, 2012 11:50 pm

Talk about shinny, need my sunnies to view your pics. :-D Get your take off storted and your away mate, well done.

by **tehsaeas** » Tue Jan 15, 2013 9:16 pm

My first 2 runs.

First was the Turbo yeast, 10kg sugar in a 25lt batch X2 fermented over 7 days cleared pretty much the next and ran it. being my first run ever i was a little excited about take off speeds and had it bucketing out the whole process including heating up took 2.5 hours. a 50lt batch, 2 x the 25 turbo classics i ended up with 9lt of 80% not bad for a stripping run, it taste like shit tho.

And for that reason i tried the TPW same setup. 2x 25lt batches with the recipe from this site. i took a little longer to run this one. 5 hours and i ended up with about 4.5lt of 95+ % tastes clean, no burn and no dodgy smells. exactly what i was looking for. now i know i can make good grade stuff i will start working on my fermenting process to try and have the temperature control more accurate.

can anyone tell me how much 95% abv i should end up with from approx 50lt TPW?

by **BackyardBrewer** » Tue Jan 15, 2013 10:33 pm

tehsaeas wrote:can anyone tell me how much 95% abv i should end up with from approx 50lt TPW?

I did a run of about 22L today. Kept maybe 2.2L of hearts. If you worked on tops and I mean MAX 10% of what went into the still you'd be doing well.

I've taken to doing a run of all left over heads & tails at about 40% when I have about 10L of 40% feints to reclaim all the booze and effort :-)