EZ Solder 2" Shotgun

[Twisted Brick]

Hey all -

I wanted to share some of the steps of how I put together my shotgun, which I tackled after gaining enough confidence from building my pot still.

After I was gifted a piece of 30" x 2" and 49" x 3" type L copper pipe, it seemed logical to go with a 3" pot still and 2" shotgun. The major influence here on my design was Zapata, whose thread on tube and baffle design guidelines I must've read through a dozen times (lengthy version on AD). This led me to pore through white papers on heat transfer theory, shell and tube geometry, laminar flow, etc and was able to come up with the specs I did. Too bad my wife's father isn't still with us - he was an MIT chemical engineer who specialized in heat transfer in industrial (nuclear) boilers. Oh well.

The build itself was inspired by BigSwede, by his beautiful machine work and simply elegant flanged end caps. I don't have access to those kinds of machines/skills but was fortunate (light shines down from parted clouds above and angels sing) to have a neighbor across the street who owns a CNC mill shop, and can work from napkin drawings. The thought was to take BigSwede's end cap flange design and apply it to the vapor tube holes as well. Hopefully, this would make soldering much easier/cleaner, and increase the chances of success. Mostly, this was my way of reducing or eliminating the pooling of vaporsat the top of the condenser, leading to possible smearing.