Hillbilly John's still pictures

[hillbilly_john]

Finally getting my pics together of my fun evening building a still. Didn't have more than a few hours into this baby. Here are pictures with some commentary. I don’t have the costs put together because I believe that denial is the best policy here.

Here is a picture of the finished product. Most will recognise it as the Valved Reflux Still documented at moonshinestill.com Full credit to this document for laying this out step-by-step. Still shown without thermometer.

OK, I lost a lot of the original pictures when the photo sharing site went pecker-up so these pictures are recently taken..hence some of the oxidizing you see.

Finished Still


The hardest part is definitely mating the head to the boiler lid. Here was plan A. I drilled the hole so the mail copper fitting fit snug in the hole and attempted to solder it. The solder took for the most part but the hole let too much thru so I had to abandon this method.

lost this picture

I then tried silver soldering the female fitting direct to the SS top - seemed like it was pretty solid but I wanted to be sure and one good nudge and it broke the seal. Didn't want that happening during a distilling run.

So then I took the female fitting and used a fitting flange that I found at the local farm supply back by the tractor parts. I left the solder on since it made for a better seal. Finished with cork gasket seal. Ideally I think I'll modify this to utilize a flat piece of copper and solder the column thru it like shown elsewhere in other posts.


Finished Top

Now for the coil. You can see some of my other thread posts about my trials and tribulations on this. Ended up using a thick walled 1/4-inch tube since the thinner stuff constantly collapsed. Stretched the whole roll (20-foot) out on the shop floor and used the springy tube bender. Very slow process. I used a 1 inch black pipe. I snaked a length of tubing up the inside of the pipe, then used the tube bender to make a loop as best I could and brought it around to start the coil. I could bend about half to 3/4-inch of tubing at a time without the bender getting bound up with the black-pipe. There's about 17 feet of tubing on the coil. Yep...3/4 of an inch at a time. Took 2 trips to the fridge.

I didn't try to make the cooling coil enter and exit the side of the pipe. Seemed like an unnecessary complication. This way I can clean it easier.

Finished Coil


So I fire this baby up with water and everything looked pretty good. Good head of steam coming out the cooling column and nowhere else (no coolant just yet). I held a seal over the cooling column and got a bunch of steam coming out the milk-pail lid seal. Adding a cork gasket seal and a good clamping system solved all that. Hoping to run more water this week and add the cooling system before running my first wash.

Wish me luck. Questions, comments and criticisms welcome.
JB