The old liebig on my pot still was barely coping it COULD knock down all the vapours at full power on a stripping run but only using a insane amount of water (my area has just tonight been declared as being in a drought co-incidence ?
) and it would come out warm and/or chug. Meaning I've been doing my stripping runs on lower power. I didn't want to have a great big long liebig for several reasons so I decided to TRY a mini shotgun. I just so happened to have 1/2 a coil of 6mm pipe left over from my Boka coil.
It's 6 peices of approx 380mm (15")long 6mm(1/4") pipe in a 22mm (7/8") "shell".
I temporarily hooked it up to my boiler (filled with water) as I didn't want to go to the effort of building a new column until I knew it worked and so far it's performed stunningly able to knock everything down and cool the output with just the smallest trickle.
It was a absolute pain to make though , or rather fixing all the leaks was a pain , ended up using compressed air to find them as I get fed up of filling it with water and draining it down. Perhaps if I'd done a better job of soldering the plates first time round
One of the plates I had to drill the middle hole after the outside pipes were soldered in otherwise it would just tear out. In fact I wasn't going to bother with a 6th pipe but realised there was JUST room for one more.
Pipes and plates joined Whole thing assembled next to the old inadequate one as you can see its only a fraction longer ,excuse the messy work not had chance to clean it up. View down big end. And little end I would have liked to get some twist in as well but couldn't figure out a good way of doing it. Overall I'm impressed by the increase in efficiency for just an extra couple of inches in legnth is amazing.
I know that their is a risk on blocking such small tubes but I don't intend to load any solids into my boiler AND the chance of all 6 being blocked at once is quite slim AND the cap on my column is not solidly attached so would pop off in the event of any pressure build up. So I'm not too worried.
I'll continue to carefully test as I do the cleaning runs.