The Practicalities........

[BritishChemist]

Introduction:
I'm brand spanking new here and as you may guess from my nom de plume, I'm a quite highly-qualified Chemist, Royal Society of Chemistry accredited. But I also have decades of experience (including professional) with engineering, physical property sensors, telemetry and microprocessors (ESP32 most often).

Distilling Background:
I have operated my own very small stills for a couple of decades now. I get enormous fun by "tearing the page out and starting again" with respect to still layout, modus operandi and control. The operation, in particular has to be mindful of the acuity of British Law Enforcement: stills are illegal here! Police helicopters regularly conduct IR scans of most UK towns and villages - looking for the heat signatures of those illegally growing cannabis, which issues loads of heat.
The police also have access to the amount of electricity consumed by any household - data collection and analysis is a big thing here as AI bulldozes through almost every aspect of Life. Law Enforcement included! So I keep my power requirements within the "noise" suggested by an average household's power usage. It no longer takes Rocket Science to produce an AI-derived list of likely cannabis growers; or large pot still operators; so I try hard to "keep my nose clean"!

Particular interests:
I don't follow still-building "Convention", but most definitely make a full use of Physics and energy conservation as I can.
For some (often hair-brained and experimental) still designs, I need compact ways to bend and connect multiple parts of copper tubing - I always use only copper for my still construction.
An example puzzle, recently in the process of being overcome:
I wanted several 15mm diameter horizontal copper pipes stacked vertically and just 10mm apart. They are connected from top to bottom as a long "zig zag".
A FreeCAD3D-derived pic of what I mean:

image.png

So how to make those compact "connectors" between levels? [Don't worry about the open ends - that's another story, another problem!]
The radius of a 180 degree pipe curve using a pipe bender is just much too large.
Also, how to hold all the parts together whilst they are being silver-soldered? (I always try to use silver solder, for strength, and it comes in handy if I want to soft-solder any later ideas/additions without compromising the base platform!)

Do other Members here have similar traits (experimental, random thought, happiness at overcoming metalworking problems!)
I am in the process of building a jig which will allow me to accurately mill out the necessary copper to make those short connectors.
Yes, I do have a milling machine, lathe and universal grinder......
After that I just need to find a way to hold all of the bits, accurately, in place whilst I solder them!
No need to tell me that I'm an oddball!
I work almost always "out of the box" led by logic rather than tradition.

Hope that at least some Members find this intro post ringing all sorts of "been there, done that" bells and will note that I do this mostly for fun. I'm not an alcoholic and don't need gallons and gallons of the stuff. I enjoy the hobby in the fully rounded sense of the phrase!