The plan is fairly simple, I've decided to save myself the time and expense and buy a large sight glass designed to fit 4" plates, but will be fabbing up the plates myself. I plan to use palinkagus's design for the caps: viewtopic.php?f=50&t=52116 as this will reduce the need for tight-order soldering, especially as I don't have a torch big enough for silver soldering.
22mm is slightly less than 7/8", 28mm is roughly 1-1/8".
The upcomers will be 5x 22mm pipes. 22mm is the OD. I will cut, form and flare these as has been done above in order to create a mounting to screw the bubble caps into. For the caps, I will use 28mm end caps which I plan to slot to about 5mm height. This will leave a gap of 3mm all the way around (roughly 1/8")
As people have been talking about inadequately sized downcomers, I plan to use 28mm pipe, this will be soldered so that it is sticking 20mm (3/4") above the tray. The downcomer will descend about 50mm (2") and soldered to an offset 35mm endcap, 5mm from the bottom. This leaves a 7mm gap at it's widest. This will act as the trap.
What are your thoughts? Am I pushing a little too big on the pipe sizes? Are my bubble cap gaps big enough, and how about the sizing for the downcomer and trap? I could scale this down to 15mm upcomers with 22mm caps and a 22mm downcomer, which mimics the 1/2" caps and 3/4" downcomers. The pot is a 50L unit with a 4.4KW element.
Here's a rough drawing (mostly to scale) of what I'm thinking:
Many thanks!
