Goofy things I do

[humbledore]

Very creative build cranky! Thanks for posting.

[cranky]

Very creative build cranky! Thanks for posting.

Thank you humbledore, I hope to get it fired up soon and post pix of it running. I hope it works as well as I want but now I need to learn to drive it properly.

[Soggy Bottom Boy]

.
.
A portable still-head, complete with carrying handles!

Of course, we all know that using non-borosilicate glass is a bad thing. But then again, ...we are being bad boys just by being here, aren't we!

[cranky]

I did say it was a bad idea. It is also very thick glass, I had to take great care when working to prevent stress risers and it has to be run in such a way to prevent shock heating and cooling plus other factors due to coefficient of expansion and each mug it supported just in case there is a failure. Plus I haven't showed you guys this part of my setup.

[firewater69]

Damn Cranky, over prepping a bit ain't we.

[bearriver]

Hey Cranky, do you got an empty fire extinguisher I can trade you for when you swing by? I'm looking for one to make into a small crucible for aluminum.

Check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHD10DjxM1g" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;" rel="nofollow / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSoWxG30rb0" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;" rel="nofollow

[cranky]

Damn Cranky, over prepping a bit ain't we.

What can I say, hope for the best, prepare for the worst Actually when I first got started in this hobby I was looking for a fire extinguisher and as luck would have it a lot of 8 of them came up at a local auction and I picked them all up for less than the cost of one at a store.

[cranky]

Hey Cranky, do you got an empty fire extinguisher I can trade you for when you swing by? I'm looking for one to make into a small crucible for aluminum.

Check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHD10DjxM1g" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;" rel="nofollow

No problem. One of then is actually below the green. I'll bring it with me, I saw that forge a while back and have been planning on doing the same, maybe using it to do some of that anthill art.

[cranky]

Well I'm feeling better and managed to get the M2 set up and run. It didn't go well. I somehow managed to get some of the gaskets in wrong and had leaks, so I had to take the whole thing apart again. Thats one of the problems with something built in so many sections, lots of joints to leak and keep checking while running. So this time I wrapped the bottom of the mugs with PTFE tape and managed to wrap the gaskets in to keep them in place while I assembled. The tops of the mugs were wrapped with tape and no gaskets just allowing a bit of overlap to fold over the top to serve as a gasket. 5 rolls of tape later I reassembled, re-packed and put everything together. I did a water only run last night and it is now leak free. I tried to get a picture showing it running but non of them really looked like much so I didn't post any. A video would have been pretty impressive but I just don't want to show that sort of thing on youtube.

[cranky]

This morning I did the second and final sac run for the M2. That actually went extremely well. It would appear that the plates or perhaps the base of the mugs had a tendency to work as plates.

I began my run by turning the controller on full and letting it warm up. I had added some feints to the already warm water from the leak check last night so it didn't take long before the column began to show signs of loading up. Soon the first mug was about half full of bubbling liquid and the second mug began to fill from the bottom up much like a plated column does. As the first neared the top the 3rd mug began to fill. By this time the top was already raining back down out of the dephleg and the mugs continued to fill / flood progressing upward the mug above beginning to fill about the time the mug below was half full. I let the flooding build until it reached about halfway up the 7th mug then turned the power down a bit. caused the flood to begin to recede.

Then I slowly cracked the valve on the product condenser until I had some water flow. This cut down on the amount of water to the reflux condenser so the product began flowing and the flood continued to drop. I was pretty impressed by the the purity right off the bat but I really need to get a better pump or two but everything worked as it should.

[NgrainD]

Cranky,

I've been watching, waiting for this day. How truly and utterly amazing. You sir, did one hell of a fine job.

[cranky]

I have to say, the purity was a bit lower than I get from my Boka but I suppose I shouldn't complain about 94.5% on a first run.

Especially given the takeoff speed was this

Which was a quart in roughly 10 minutes. My Boka did 96+% at a pint every 20-24 minutes so I think I can dial it in to a much better speed then the Boka.
So all in all I'm very happy with the Muggles Too but then something happened a little while ago that has thrown a monkey wrench into the works.

This showed up on my doorstep

When I was reworking the mugs following the leaks I had the other day my wife asked me a few questions about it and ordered a 95mm by 50 inch long borosilicate tube.
Why 95mm? Because the O.D. of the mugs is 95mm. 50" long is the overall length of the mugs, gaskets and spacers. Basically all I need to do is take the mugs out and put it back together with the boro tube in it's place. and the boro tube cost less than I spent on solder alone. If I had known that I would have ordered that when I was first starting in this hobby.

My problem now is after all the work on the M2 I have grown quite attached to it and don't really want to take it apart again. What I am thinking about doing is once again disassembling the M2 making perf plates, adding a Dad300 condenser at the top and making it a 3 or 4 plate magic muggles flute for rum and whiskey. That would give me pretty much everything I want as far as stilling, I already have a pot/stripper I am very happy with, then the boro for a neutralizer and then the muggles flute for flavored. Just thinking out loud a bit there.

[still_stirrin]

....This showed up on my doorstep....That would give me pretty much everything I want....

What??? And quit building? I'd bet otherwise. Maybe a moratorium from building...but not an end.

Oh, and that was VERY thoughtful of your wife...and attentive too. You've gotta' make something tasty for her to drink as a "thank you".
ss

[cranky]

Cranky,

I've been watching, waiting for this day. How truly and utterly amazing. You sir, did one hell of a fine job.

Thank you, I'm actually quite proud of this one even though there are still a few cosmetic things to attend to.

[cranky]

....This showed up on my doorstep....That would give me pretty much everything I want....

What??? And quit building? I'd bet otherwise. Maybe a moratorium from building...but not an end.

Oh, and that was VERY thoughtful of your wife...and attentive too. You've gotta' make something tasty for her to drink as a "thank you".
ss

She is great and knows a lot about glass as well so was able to get the right tube. In all fairness the neutral and thus the neutralizer is to make her toasted almond (Kahlua and Amaretto). I'm happy with the brandy and fruit based stuff that doesn't take 16 hours to run. The other day she told me she wants rum because we went to Vegas a couple weeks ago and she was drinking pena coladas and wants to switch up. So I just picked up some molasses and will be giving rum a try sometime this summer.

[frodo]

that shit is so funky it is cool as hell,,,hats off to a warped creative brilliant mind.


all i can say,,,go ahead wit your bad self!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[cranky]

that shit is so funky it is cool as hell,,,hats off to a warped creative brilliant mind.


all i can say,,,go ahead wit your bad self!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Thank you Frodo glad you like it.

[MichiganCornhusker]

I bow down cranky, that whole adventure is straight up magnificent!
Very nice of you to warn us not to make a flute from dollar store mugs, but it is clear you know what you're doing, outside the lines, and I applaud. That crazy ass beast is a pure extension of yourself, and it does you proud.

[goose eye]

Dern good job. Ole boys always wanted to see the inside cookin. They
had one of them old parascopes the use to sale a long while back
couldn't see nothin but fog.
Amazing the talent here

So I'm tole

[cranky]

I bow down cranky, that whole adventure is straight up magnificent!
Very nice of you to warn us not to make a flute from dollar store mugs, but it is clear you know what you're doing, outside the lines, and I applaud. That crazy ass beast is a pure extension of yourself, and it does you proud.

Thanks MCH I've always been an outside the lines sort of person and it really is an extension of me.

[cranky]

Dern good job. Ole boys always wanted to see the inside cookin. They
had one of them old parascopes the use to sale a long while back
couldn't see nothin but fog.
Amazing the talent here

So I'm tole

Thank you Goose eye, I find it very interesting to see whats going on inside the column. With this setup I can clearly see whats going up as well as down.

[cranky]

On the subject of seeing what is going on I have this bit of observation to add
Unlike many others who run glass, I found that the thermometer wasn't really necessary and I was able control things by watching the amount of fluid being returned by the reflux condenser and adjusting accordingly. This may change as things progress but this is my observation for now. I will know more after the birdwatchers I have going right now is finished, it will give me an apples to apples comparison to the Bokas performance. One thing I noticed was I didn't get the surging/detonation wave that Scow69 had in his videos on his 2" column in this thread
http://homedistiller.org/forum/viewtopi ... 17&t=54682
I'm wondering if this is because of the narrowing of the mugs at the bases which should have had the effect of speeding up and slowing down the vapor speed which I assume broke up the wave. With the 1.5" boka I can hear the surging that Skow encountered so I am also wondering if it is associated with the smaller diameter of the column itself. Maybe it is being caused by a higher vapor speed in the column. I'm sure I will know more when I switch over to the solid boro tube and I'm just thinking out loud again.

[cranky]

I thought it was time for an update on my activities.
So as you know the wife threw a monkey wrench into the works and somewhat derailed my plans. I did succeed in my evil plan of getting the M2 up and running but now after much debating I have decided to go ahead and begin the conversion of the M2 to a plated column and use the boro tube to make the neutralizer. The reason it took a lot of debate is that I decided to make things easy for now and use the dephleg and rods off the M2 for the new one. I plan on buying new rods and making a new dephleg for the M2 flute. I will either make a new shotgun dephleg or somehow if I manage to get the paint off the corrugated SS I have I will make a Dad300 reflux condenser. I would like to go dad style but can only find the kind with paint or powder coating so I may just wind up making a new shotgun dephleg. I will figure that out later, what I do know right now is I need to use some of the parts off the M2 to make the new one.

So now I am starting the new one and the first thing I decided to do was make a new base for the column. I've never been all that happy or trusting of the base I made for the M2 mainly because of my distrust of my soldering job of the copper to SS and I wound up getting it a bit off center.

For the replacement I carefully measured center and cut a hole slightly smaller than 2" and used an arbor press to push a socket through the hole to make a flange that sits down inside the 2" tube.

I also made a ring that fit loosely around the boro tube and soldered that to the round plate and then soldered on some 3/4" long pieces of 1/2" pipe to reinforce it and act as a guide for the rods. In all actuality the rods shouldn't be necessary because the fit of the tube itself is such that once it is wrapped with PTFE tape it should both seal and hold together. Unlike with the M2 the rods are just there as a precaution.

For the piece that goes from the base to the keg I originally cut a length of the SS pipe I have and soldered that to the copper but didn't really trust that but it was water tight so I figured it would work. Then I stopped by a hardware store going out of business and managed to get a couple 2" copper couplings pretty cheap so I took one of the couplings, annealed it by heating it up and quenching it in water, than cut slots in it and squeezed them together, than cut them again and squeezed a bit more until the bottom of the fitting fit inside the neck of the keg. Then I soldered all the cuts and added an easy flange to the bottom, the top flange to the top and cleaned everything up. I then made some everlasting gaskets sized just perfectly to fit the inside of the flange and just a bit smaller than the inside of the glass tube. Then I wrapped the ends of the glass tube with PTFE tape and slid the top and bottom pieces onto the tube to check fit.

Everything fit together well so this evening I bolted everything together and it is ready for cleaning runs. After a standard regiment of cleaning runs I will pull the dephleg off and pack the glass tube with the lava rock taken out of the M2 and I should be ready to see how fast I can run neutral.

I am actually a little sad about taking the M2 apart because I had become attached to it but I think the design will lend itself well to a flute which I will begin working on within the next week or so. After all I do have just about everything I need to make the plates, I just need to try to figure out the number and size of holes. which leads to questions that I don't yet have the answers to. Do I base my holes on the diameter of the holes in the bottoms of the mugs or the diameter of the base of the mug or the widest part of the mug? Just thinking out loud again.

I've been a bit remiss about taking pictures but I'll try to take some and get them up in the next day or two.

[cranky]

As promised here are a couple pix of some of the pieces of the Neutralizer. This first one is the base taken during the vinegar run. You can see the vinegar bubbling on top if the strainer plate. The strainer plate is just like a shower drain plate, I drilled a bunch of 0.2ish diameter holes in the plate with one 3/8" hole in the middle just to act as a packing retainer. It was actually acting like a plate and holding the vinegar on top.

In the picture you can kind of see how I made the 2" coupling taper down small enough for the easy flange.

This next picture just shows how I connected the Top Hat piece to the dephleg. Although it didn't leak when I had this on the M2 I added some bolts between the all-thread rods because I thought it looked like a potential problem area.

[cranky]

Well a funny thing happened while I was doing my vinegar run. I noticed the gauge on my controller wasn't working. I was about done anyway so I turned the controller down and the vinegar continued to boil as if nothing had happened. So now I'm getting concerned and grabbed my meter to do some troubleshooting. I flip the switch to off and wait for the boiling to stop and it doesn't. After a while I just unplug it and the plug sparks which indicates that maybe the switch failed in the on position. So I pull the front cover off and start checking everything. The switch functioned normally, everything seemed to ohm out normally so I start thinking well maybe the meter just failed. I can run it fine without the meter so I go about draining the remaining vinegar and refill the boiler with water, then go to plug the control box back in and realized when I did the vinegar run I had accidentally plugged the boiler directly into the extension cord rather than run the power through the controller. Damn, I need to pay more attention to that sort of thing. So false alarm, everything is fine, vinegar and water runs are done. Sac run is next then repack, maybe another sac run and then we will see how well this thing will work.

[cranky]

I have another little update. Last night the sac run went outstandingly well with the unpacked column except for a little incident where I turned my back and the return hose came out of my reservoir and I didn't notice. Then before I noticed my new pump managed to completely empty my 25 gallon reservoir all over the garage floor but I had the other one on cool down mode from the previous runs and I caught it before the condenser quit working so it wasn't too bad.

Today I loosened the reflux condenser and slid it up a few inches and added the lava rocks I had used in the M2 but because of factors involving the mugs I found myself to be about a quart and a half short of properly sized lava rocks. I'm usually off Thursdays and today is no different so I normally spend my mornings making a nice breakfast and watching an anime cartoon called Inuyasha. Today was no different there either except I decided to try to multi task and smash rocks while sitting in bed watching my cartoon. I was trying to be as neat and tidy as possible and spread out an old sheet placed a slab of wood I use for those sorts of things in my lap grabbed a hammed and screw driver to act as a chisel and proceeded to smash rocks as I watch my cartoon. Well the very first rock I split a piece broke off and went flying into the far wall with some force and my wife said "OH NO YOU DON'T! I don't mind you eating crackers in bed but I draw the line at smashing lava!" So I had to wait until my show was over and go smash rocks on the deck

So a little later I took my bag of rocks and tools and proceeded to smash enough rocks to fill the new tube up but while doing so I made what I think is a pretty cool find. I broke one in half and found a little pocket of green gemmy looking crystals.

This kind of concerned me but I finished my task of breaking rocks then washed and prepped them and looked up what these crystals are. Turns out they are most likely Olivine which is a magnesium iron silicate commonly known as Peridot when it is gem quality and is a common in scoria. So I'm not really worried about it contaminating anything. I think it is pretty cool so I am going to add it to my treasure box where I keep certain valuables.

After that I went ahead and finished packing the column and bolting the reflux condenser back on and since I used more lava rock I am going to make another sac run before doing a product run. But here is the finished picture of the neutralizer.

[frodo]

http://www.cerakoteguncoatings.com/

I dont know if this will work for you or not...just throwing it out here for you to investigate.


http://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/O ... 07563.html

[cranky]

I just finished another sac run for the new packing and I'm very happy with everything. No leaks, no problems, it's real cool to watch this thing run although it is obvious I will need to run 2 water pumps on separate reservoirs to be able to get the control of water flow and purity I want. Nothing I didn't know going into this. I also knew the new condenser was a bit short and thus requires a pretty good water flow rate to knock everything down. Once I'm sure I'm happy with this and ready to retire the boka I will probably steal the extension pipe I use to extend my 1.5" pipe to 42" and add a second shotgun section for additional cooling. I'll get a picture of things running when I do the next run on it but it runs a lot like Skow69's 2" but as I suspected didn't have the surging his seemed to.

[cranky]

Saturday I began the mods to convert the M2 to a Magic Muggles Flute. I began by taking one of my copper dinner plated, figuring out how many perf plates I could make out of it and cutting them out. I was surprised to find that one plate could actually make 5 perf plates. My original thought was that I could only make 2 out of each plate. Being able to make 5 saves on precious copper and leaves me with 2 of the original 9 copper dinner plates I started with.

Next I figured out the area of the base of the mug. The I.d. of the mugs at the top are 3.33 but they taper a bit and are thicker at the bottom. I used 2.5" as the starting point for plate size to make sure I could get everything under the base of the mug. The actual hole in the base of the mug is a little over 2 inches so I figure I'm ok calculating the perf plates for 2.5".

With the diameter of the plate decided I did some calculating. I remember reading in the flute talk thread that 3/32" was the ideal drill size and you want about 8% of the total area of the plate to be taken up by the holes so I calculated that out and came up with 57 holes as the ideal number. Next I drew a 2.5" circle on a piece of paper. I drew a circle in the center for the downcomer then drew out a 1/4" grid. This gave me about 59 holes, actually it gave me 70 but I removed 11. This was close enough to the ideal number of holes for me.

Most people put the downcomer off to one side, I located mine in the center because when I drilled the holes in the bottom of the mugs I didn't get them completely centered and I was concerned this would cause problems with interference. My plan is to have a spout of sorts come off the downcomer to keep the drainage away from the center. I'm also considering making an umbrella for the top of the downcomer to shield it from the falling liquid. The more I think about that the better I like it. I might even make the downcomer trap centered with an upside down umbrella to keep the liquid away from the center and uniformly distributed. Just thinking out loud again.

Anyway, once I determined the spacing and location of the holes I made some copies of the paper, cut the pattern out and stuck them to each of the plates using double back tape. Then I proceeded to drill out all those little holes. It really didn't take that long. Then I ran out of play time for the day. So here are pictures of yesterdays work.

Yesterday, I drilled up the center hole for the downcomer and began finish sizing the plate to fit inside the existing couplings but got to thinking it might be a good idea to just unsolder the plates from the old couplings and solder in the new perf plates. If I do everything right I may not even need to use gaskets, just a few wraps with PTFE tape might be enough to seal it up. So I believe I will try to do that, which means even more solder. Again, solder is the most expensive part of this build. I also think I don't really need the guide tubes on the sides of the couplings, They only seemed to make things harder to put together. I might leave the guides on the very center coupling but will be removing them from the rest.
Anyway here is yesterdays progress

[Bushman]

I'm a little confussed Cranky, if all your plate downcomers are located in the center how does it drop to the next lower plate without going all the way down? Most downcomers that I've seen are offset from one side of the plate to the other.

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