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I posted a reply in the materials to build a still twice and each time my post has been deleted (lucky i saved a copy elsewhere 2nd time)? So I will post it in its own topic. Am I being edited for a reason?

Im gonna throw some fuel on the plastics fire:P

Seems every community has somthing they demonise, here it is plastic. Who drinks from a plastic water bottle? This has plasticisers in it, as do most things, even alot of alcohol has plastic incontact with the liquid somwhere in the design. Now I respect that as your exposed to plasticisers on a regular basis you may choose to not want it in your alcohol. But hear me out. Polypropylene is a plastic that shows resistance to ethanol, infact its one of many. Yes you will get some plasticisers in your product but you will also get copper in your product if you use a copper tube to carry your distillate, in both cases the quantity is likely to be negligable. You know that "new smell", thats you getting a big burst of plasticisers.

Im a chemists and have a chemist friend who built his still outta poly pipe, that makes it cheap and he has had no problems. So perhaps instead of demonising all plastic you could just direct people to ones which are safe for use.

* I tried to post this before and had included a link to chemical resistivity of polypropylene but it didnt work and now I cant be arsed finding it again, google will return many hits to polypropylene resistivity.

lol yea - im all for polyprop

if i could find a supplier of polyprop drums id abandon my keg search in favour of the polymer

Am also in the process of designing my 2m high polyprop water still to replace my current 0.9m copper still - so far its looking to cost a fraction the price even at over twice the height.

For me it's mostly ignorance. I don't know the first thing about plastics or how they react with alcohol and I don't care to invest the effort to learn. I figure that I'm drinking water coming through copper pipes anyway and people have distilled with copper since the beginning, so it's known to be safe. And some chemistry people around here say copper reacts favorably with some of the undesirables that would otherwise end up in the distillate.

I'm sure you're right that some plastics are okay, but for someone like me who wouldn't know the difference between safe and unsafe plastic, it's safer to just rule it out entirely. I have a white rubbery stopper to hold my thermometer and I'm trying to find a way to get rid of it even though I don't see, smell, or taste any signs of a problem.

glad to see this one wasnt edited out

I will say I built/building my stills out of copper, reason being Id never worked with it and its been fun and i figured a copper still not only looks better but would be more durable over a long period of time (ie decades). But if i wanted more Id make them out of polypropylene.

Quick quiz. How come commercial stillers don't use plastics in stills? You think they enjoy wasting $50 bucks a pound on copper when they could get the same shape outta 10 cents worth of plastic?

It's your health, your life. Do it your way. We won't stop you.

.

hahaha loverly, thats the response i was waiting for, thank you for the first two posters for listerning

Ive never seen a commercial still but I would assume that they would use metals due to their structural integrety and longjevity. During the packing process im sure the alcohol would come into contact with plastic somewhere though.

The reasoning that because commercial stills dont use plastic thus its bad for you is crap its like this:
Now, Im a horticulturist and I specialise in cacti, I sprout my seeds inside a container and I leave them there in a warm moist (dripping) environment for upto a year. The reason I do this is they grow alot faster like this. Now how many cacti seedlings in the wild get 24hour moisture for a year straight? My guess is very very very few, just because they get no water in the wild doesnt mean they cant take more water, even their own habitat can be bettered. I hope you see the analogy in that. Likewise just because commercial business do somthing doesnt mean they have your best intrests in heart.

Do you think I would suggest that people can use plastics if in fact I thought, with my knowledge of chemistry, that it would be detrimental?

Contrary to what seeems the belief here there is more then one type of plastic, some will be damaged by 96% EtOH but lots wont be.

Copper pipe isnt the saintly angel you make it out to be either. Cleanlyness is the solution though.

http://www.brita.com.au/why_filter_water/copper2" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;" rel="nofollow

hehe as my friend who refered me to this site said " Now, if you go to homedistiller, you will hear all sorts of superstition about the evils of plastic. OTOH, most of the naysayers don't understand the difference between PVC and polypropylene. Also expect to be "informed" that a beer keg, preferably gold-plated , is the only thing serious distillers use as a boiler. The nice part here is that the unplated variety are, ahem, cheap, if you get my drift ..."

Lovely how you just prooved him right.

Get me straight Im not advocating building a whole still outta poly pipe (though if you do and you want the copper to remove the smelly compounds just use copper mesh inside the column), just saying maybe you guys shouldnt demonise all plastics when people attach them to their stills, namely do drain the alcohol from the condensor to the receiver. The only really good reason I heard from anyone was that the plastic will be stained by smells and tastes, this is possible but again cleaning is the key plus they are cheap cheap cheap.

Oh, and use a spell checker. You'll be more believable.

I appreciate your knowledge and education, and there may be many, many plastics that can be used. If you are confident in the plastics you use.....that is great! Most of us however, do not have the knowledge on which plastics could be used safely, as a result, a blanket "don't use plastic" warning is issued. If you don't use plastic, you can't go wrong. If you do use plastic......you just might.

Thanks CoopsOz for explaining that That makes sense.

Harry, Im the first to admit Im a crap speller as it never was my strong point, I grew up with spellcheck so it really became a mute point. I just ran spell check on what I wrote in the last post and there wasnt too much when compared to some people. If you choose not to believe me that is your choice but why would I bother to tell people you can use some plastics if I had no idea whether you could or couldnt?

="Lorax


a mute point. ?

Or perhaps a moot point? I cant hear the mute one.

I delited the posts I dont like trolls and Im going to lock this one.

My big problem with folks sayin' plastic is safe is the studies they use to prove their point. These studies ALLWAYS focus on the resistance of the plastic to the alcohol, which is ass-backwards. What is the plastic doin' to the alcohol? I dunno, 'cause the studies don't go into that.

When someone can post a link to a study done by a trusted lab or university that is specifically about how different plastics affect and leach into ethanol and water mixes I'll be the first one to post it into the materials section.

Just because cheap 80 proof booze is sold in plastic bottles, doesn't mean it's a good idea or safe. "But the government allows it! They wouldn't let the mega distillers sell us cheap booze in a cheaper container if it would hurt us." I say that's crazy thinkin'. The government is just made up of real people, fallible people. The government told us lead pipes were safe once, they used to think Thilidimide was a wonder drug and was especially safe, so they gave it to pregnant mothers. The list goes on and on.

I'm not knockin' the government... they are sadly often doin' the best they can. What I'm sayin' here is folks gotta rely on themselves, not the government, and a little bit of common scense will go a long way to help. Will the combination of plastic/heat/and alcohol be discovered to be dangerous some day? Quite likely. Will the combination of copper or stainless steel and heat and alcohol be found to be dangerous? Probably not, because simply they have been used for so long. It's only after a new material is used for a new purpose that the problems are found.

I'll be boring and dull and use safe materials. Feel free to do as you please, and if you choose to be experimental I'll pray that ya don't end up a statistic on some new study.