A lazy day building in the sun!

[EccentricDyslexic]

WOW! Nice chiller!

Steve

[Naich]

Look at the coils on that! Cor! I'm going a bit Bernard Bresslaw now.

[DomClarke]

I would do it myself, but no access to a pillar drill so I'll leave it to you

[Dennis King]

No wonder the copper price has gone up, think you have cornered the market there.
Top build

[beermonsta]

Many thanks for the kind compliments so far
been busy doing more here...
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=41572
and here...
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=41588

[BarnsleyBrewer]

Love the wort chiller and the shiney stuff.

[GARYSMIFF]

SEXY

[beermonsta]

Finally got round to finishing Skiptonians immersion cooler. Did the final soldering on Thursday (seemed to have some extra time available for some reason ) and then this evening I attached the machine valves before conducting a leak test using mains water pressure. I was "well chuffed" that there was no leaks, as it's very tricky tring to solder the 4 8mm copper pipes and the 22mm copper pipe together using a brass manifold.
Here is a video of the leak test...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4mAhTRbaz4



I also made Skiptonian a spinny sparge arm and did a flow rate test....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGvGTIiq ... er&list=UL
In the video I marked 1 and 0.5 litre increments. From 0.42 to 1.27 which I make as 45 seconds, one litre of water or put another way 1.33l per minute was sparged (I believe the recommended rate is 330ml per minute!).
At 1.33l per min my normal brewlength of 70ish litres would take 56 mins to sparge (at the recommended rate this would take nearly 4 hours!!!)

Obvioulsy the bigger your brewlength the more accpetable it is to sparge quicker. You have to remember that the big boys have massive amounts of liqour to sparge and they ain't gonna do it at 330ml per min!!!
This stands to reasons as the bigger your brewlength the more liqour you are going to sparge, and if you look at the process from a simple point of view that your are just rinsing the grains of excess sugar then the quantity of sparge liqour vs the quantity grain becomes an increasingly bigger gap so you will need less liqour to rinse effectively.
As the amount of liqour is a fixed volume then the speed of sparging can therefore become quicker, with a result of less sugars being extracted per second but with the increase in volume of sparge liquor it compensates for that fact - Does that make sense to anyone else as that's the way I see it



I should stop making nice gear thats better than my own for free for other people

[Naich]

Very nice. This is pure brewing porn of the filthiest kind. You should make a video with the sparge arm spinning round, spraying water onto that chiller. Oh you dirty coils. You like to chill wort, don't you?

Ahem. Yes, as I was saying. Very nice sir

[BarnsleyBrewer]

Nice sparge arm, what size is the brass tube and holes?

BB

[beermonsta]

Oh you dirty coils. You like to chill wort, don't you?

PMSL

thats the nicest, yet quirkiest, funniest compliment I've every had!

...and BB it's all about the girth and hole size isn't it
apparently it's "4mm Brass K and S Tubing 12" from ebay ...http://myworld.ebay.co.uk/maccmodels was the seller.
and the hole size is the smallest I could find in my drill bit collection. I hope its 0.5mm but it's hard to guess at that size but deffinately no more than 1mm. I'll get the calipers from work and let you know!

Ahh bugger it! I might as well let you all know some hints about the construction. The parts are easy to source off ebay. It effectively means using three fittings to reduce the feed from 15mm down to the 4mm tubing. Each was sealed with PTFE tape. In the centre is a 4mm brass T (not the hot beverage type or the type that throws snickers). From the main 4mm feed brass tube, the important bit is the pivot. This is done by tightening the compression nut so that the olive inside grips the brass rod to the point where it can't be removed easily. You then need to dissassemble the compression nut and wind PTFE around the thread this is to stop the nut when re-applied from unwinding and separating from the body of the T. Got that? Good.
As a side, when you do reapply the nut, tighten it by finger to the point that the arms stop spinning then back it off 1/4 o 1/2 a turn. No more as this will allow the brass tube to 'wobble' too much and create addition friction...and you don't want that!
I then applied one to two turns of ptfe around the olive. As Puftee tape has a very low 'friction coefficient' (think teflon, non-stick pans ...they should spray this stuff on the pond life who wander the streets of britain to stop "sh!t sticking to Sh!t"...ahem, sorry, I digress) it allows the olive to spin inside the nut with the minimal of friction - although be careful which way you wrap the tape as this will effect the way you want the sparge arm to spin.

Next up is the main arms. Start by measuring the diameter of your mash tun, and taking into account the width of the T cut the brass tube to equal lengths to allow enough clearance so it doesn't catch on mash tun (I left 10mm each side). To cut the tube I used a pair of mini bolt cutters. This meant that the tube was squashed and left a very neat almost sealed edge. A simple soldering iron, flux and solder allowed a very easy job of sealing the ends of the tube almost like tinning a wire.

Then I had to choose to cut the holes. I reckon I used a 0.5 mm drill bit, but as I said I will measure and check. I fortunately while routing through my tool box found a sharp centre punch. Using the gap between two block that I built my shed with, resting on the mortar between the blocks I placed the brass tubing and using the centre punch made a tap where I wanted a hole. This made a sufficient "dint" in the hole to prevent the drill bit from wandering. This is very important as I heard many people struggled with this step breaking many drill bits, probably because they allowed the bit to "wander". Next using the drill bit in a hand held drill I drilled the hole. Again here a lot of people would break drill bits because they place the bit as normal with 2" of bit protruding from the chuck. NO NEED! place the bit deep in the chuck so only 2mm is exposed. This means that when you drill, the bit won't break as there is too little drill bit to cause leverage sufficient to break the bit, and second it is impossible to drill through the brass tube and throught the other side TOP TIP!

At this point I would like to mention that I followed BZ's advice of staggering holes, so that on one arm the holes are 0.5 to 1cm futher out than the other arm. This seems initially to make perfect sense so yo get a better "spread" of liqour but in reality as I tested each hole I made I often found (even thought the holes where clean and perpendicular) that the spray would go in it's own direction, sometimes with two holes spray crossing paths! In theory, nice, in reality, being home made, not something to worry too much about.

I first drilled holes for propultion at either end of the arms. These are at 90' to the mash bed. Under test these spinned brilliantly using just 1/2 a meter head of water, and like a banshee using my march may 809 pump. You then 'go ahead' (do you like the americanism?!) and drill more holes for the sparging. The more holes drilled the less propultion using gravity feed had, understandably. Using the pump however, the better it became. I used a full bore lever valve to control the flow to simulate different flow rates from my MM809.
Eventually for a 80l thermopot mash tun length arm, nine holes spaced at 2cm centres on either arm worked out to be the optimal. I also made the holes follow a 90' helix pattern from nearest the T pointing straight down to the mash, to the ends where the holes were at 90' to the mash for propultion.

One final test I had was the spray area coverage (which is often overlooked). For this I started the arm spinning and moved the arm rapidly over a dry area of concrete pavement stones. Within 1 second the liqour had covered the entire area of the "mash surface" with only and outer 'orbit' of liqour formed from the liqour used to propel the arms around.

Apologies for my poor spelling, I've not re-installed the spell check tool bar since my hard drive went ka-put. And please don't ask me what the fittings I used are,,,CBA to look it up! (to be honest I followed someone elses post for parts not that long ago, but bugger me if I can find the link (the bookmark in my favourites went down with the hard drive in Titanic way
BM

[46philh]

That looks just like mine but use the solar pump. Thanks must go to UP and aleman though.

having a flat end on the rod is a great help to be able to turn the rod to re-position the holes to fine tune it.

Have done quite a few brews now with it and always worked fine with good coverage.

Link below.

[stevetk189]

Wow! I don't know what to say other than, "DO WANT!"

Incredible work.