Plastic conical FV build - pics

[jaybie]

There is a technique called "flame polishing" which can be used to remove small scratches and tool/sandpaper marks. Basically you just dance a naked flame over the area just enough to melt the surface and allow the marks to sink in under a sort of surface tension. Just be careful as it is easy to scorch the plastic or melt it completely, but this is what is used commercially. Use a coolish flame (put away the oxy-acetylene cutting gear!), but not a smokey flame as it can leave soot stuck in the plastic.

Tanks-direct ( from whom i believe you got this tank) are merely resellers for TanksUK (http://www.tanksuk.co.uk) who also supply direct. I have bought a tank from them for another project and they happily fitted it with a stainless ferrule (for a small extra charge of course!), I though they were very flexible and helpful.

JB

[Kev888]

Hi, thanks for the info! I've flamed polished acrylic before, though I'm not sure if I'm personally skilled enough to do it for this.. The plastic is rather thin and now the staining has made the defects more visible they seem a bit more than surface scratches - they're tiny but not especially shallow.

Maybe its worth a try though; so far there have been no problems but I don't like trusting wort to a tank which has any visible specs of 'stuff' in the wall. Aside from that its actually working out quite well in practice, so if I can sort this it'll be worth it. Hmm..

Thanks also for the direct supplier link - I'd looked but been unable to discover who they were before.

Cheers
kev

[jaybie]

Just wondering how the lid setup for this build worked out? Did you find it satisfactory in the end?

JB

[Kev888]

Yes I guess so. I do have to put a couple of large bottles or something on the lid to press it down a bit. That seems to flatten the slightly-less-than-flat but fairly floppy top of the conical against the stainless tray pretty well. Its not hermetically sealed by any means of course, but there are no actual gaps that I can see. Though TBH I'm not the most paranoid about such things and it does also have a fermenting cupboard around it too.



My only quibble with the lid is that I can't really use CIP sprays inside the conical without quite a lot escaping - and it takes about 150L of cleaning solution to fill it so fairly costly. Could be a future tweak to fit a seal of some sort - maybe a silicone tube made into a big O-ring. It would also make blow-off tubes and airlocks meaningless too, but I've never filled it enough to need the former and never use the latter myself.

EDIT: oh by the way, my closest IKEA has now stopped stocking the stainless trays which is most annoying - supposedly some of the other branches still do though.

cheers
Kev

[Kev888]

Whilst I think of this, now that its been used in anger for a while I should probably add an update; can't believe I've had it for two years!

Its done a couple of dozen brews now with absolutely no sign of infection in the finished beer; most brews have had at least one corny not consumed for several months, so theres been time for stuff to show up. So I've concluded that my dislike of the few small surface defects is unfounded, and its fine. Okay I do soak-clean it very well after each use in a hot sodium percarbonate/metasilicate mix and I then use plentiful peracetic acid and/or starsan before use, but whilst the defects still look brown afterwards I don't think anything of any significance can be living in them.

TBH after all my whinging, this conical has actually turned out to work pretty flawlessly so i feel a lot more kindly towards it now. Its not as nice as the stainless ones and has more limitations but it quietly does the actual job pretty well. I would now consider using these plastic tanks again, though probably smaller ones - I've never had an 80L brew bubble up much beyound the 115L mark, so probably a 120L conical would have been fine - though my stainless tray may not fit a smaller one.

Cheers
Kev