You would have to pay me a hell of a lot of money to make another one of these!
I went through two ¾” and one 1” 10’ sections before finally getting it right. Thank god there’s a recycling facility nearby that pays 3USD per pound of recycled copper!
Honestly though, it’s really not that bad once you know how to do it. At first I tried to make two separate coils and then screw them together. I’m not really sure what I was thinking, but I ended up wasting a good 50USD copper. If you anneal the two pipes at night, it’s easy to get it hot enough without burning them. Once you have them both well annealed, all you need is some brute strength to coil it all up. Don’t go any smaller than 8” ID as you will start to fold the 1” copper. Were I to do it again, I would try for ~9”. PVC sewage pipe fits this diameter very well. I used ratchet tie downs to hold the pipe down to the PVC and coiled away. It was quite the workout.
Anyhow, this condenser works miracles! I just did two 25L stripping runs using 15 gallons of cooling water in a recirculation system. The condenser seemed like it was laughing at me, as though it was saying, “Is this your best shot?” I literally am not able to get this thing to spit steam. I let the cooling water get so hot I couldn’t even hold my hand in it, yet it still knocked down 3000W. I can’t wait to see just how smooth a stripping run this thing can pull.
