A little fun with metal working

[Steve Broady]

There’s a new project at the Pepe le Pew skunkworks. I need a condenser with two separate coils in it. I had a couple small test coils that I had made to see if I could make a double wound coil by hand.

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With a little adjustment, the smaller one should work for what I need. Yeah, it’s a bit kinked, but it only needs to flow a few ml/min of water at full pressure, and it’s more than good enough for that.

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I need a bigger coil as well, though. So I filled 12’ of 3/8” tubing with salt, clamped a pipe clamp to a table, and started winding. This is what I ended up with.

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I wound up with roughly 7’ of tubing in there, with a total length just under 5”. It’s small, but it’s only going on a 1500W still, so I think it’ll work.

Next up, I had to get the tubing through the side of the condenser shell. I don’t have enough vertical clearance to go out the top, unfortunately. While I could definitely just drill a hole, that doesn’t leave a lot of material to solder to. So instead, I drilled an undersized hole, heated the area red hot, then used a 3/8” flaring tool in a drill to open it up and create a flange.

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