StillSmart

It's been a while since either me or dad posted anything I need longer days or less time at work or less hobbies. Anyway the following will detail our Bubble Cap Column build. This is stage one as the project is going to be a bit of an on going experiment.

As any of you who saw our modular pot still thread will know all of our still components join via tri clamp fittings which means everything is modular so we can add in or rearrange the sequence of items.

With this in mind we began the new project by first building a new condenser / dephlagmator this is stainless steel 3" in diameter. The lower end has a stainless mesh welded in the joint between the tri clamp weld flange and the 3" stainless pipe, the other end is just a weld fitting. Next I fabricated a coil and then turned some copper fittings for the end on the coil to allow it to fit to the tube as can be seen in the image below as well as some half nuts.



Once fitted the stainless half nuts were used to secure the coil and then the push fit connectors were attached to allow connection of the water for cooling. The tube was then filled with 10mm O/D copper pipe pieces hence the reason for the mesh grill.



The next stage was to build the bubble cap, the design is a single cap the cap has a diameter of 44mm and stands 15mm high all the items are turned from copper. The image below shows the individual parts that make up the cap assemble and support plate.



The next three images show various views of the assembled items.







This image shows the cap sat in the 2" to 3" converter that expands the 2" outlet from our boiler to suit the column we are building.



This image shows the current set of parts dissembled that make up the current column layout.



And this one shows them assembled.



The image below is with the condenser removed looking down into the sight tube onto the top of the bubble cap.



This is a shot of the column running although it is not a great image



The longer term plan is to install a second plate on pillars from the first one and this plate will then sit halfway up the sight tube and will give us two plates per sight tube with the next stage being a second sight tube and two more plates to give us the option to run four plates if we want to.

The short video below shows the plate running if the link works.

http://vid661.photobucket.com/albums/uu ... unning.mp4



Cheers
Nick / Ken

Nice build, similar to the Baby CD but better in my opinion because it's 3" all the way through, I have a Baby CD with 6 plates now, they are 2.5" but it still has 2" connections in each end and I find it floods my 2" packed column quite easily, my next upgrade will be to increase the size of the packed section to 3" but I'll still need 3"-2" reducers on each end.

Where did you get the 3"-2" reducers from? eBay or are they the SD ones?

Hi Anavrin,
Yep you are right I got them from ebay from a bloke in China takes about two weeks to come and they are really good quality 316 stainless. Link below £12.88 each including postage so I did them as two orders to avoid customs duty.

http://r.ebay.com/V07rwD

Cheers
Nick

Very nice looking work.

The link to adaptors where they got the size right is useful too.

Cheers, I'm going to order a pair off ebay, how do you find the cooler? Can you get 100% reflux with it?

Only tried it with water and we did get 100% reflux but I am running it with its own supply not linked to the output from the shotgun condenser for cooling the product. will be trying it with spirit on the weekend so will see how we get on then.

Cheers
Nick

Well we have created mark 2 of the bubble cap plates which was always the intention as we wanted two caps per site glass. The two images below show the revision to the original cap that was in the photos above. The second cap has two copper discs so as to sandwich the seal that forms a flipper and subsequently seals to the sight tube. The disc on the bottom of the cap is to stop the fluid dropping straight down the centre drain of the cap below.





With the new cap assembly inserted into the sight glass we assembled the rest of the still parts as we had a stripped wash that we wanted to run through to see how it worked. The image below shows the still assembled.



With the still assembled and fired up we started the spirit run the still runs at 91% by volume to start with and once the plates were stacked ran smoothly for the whole run power input at the start was 850w increasing to 1400w by the time we finished. The video below shows the new cap assembly running. You can just see the top of the lower cap and it's centre drain as it sits in the bottom of the sight tube and is sandwiched between the tri clamp flanges.

http://vid661.photobucket.com/albums/uu ... unning.mp4



Cheers
Nick

Is that a homemade Parrot including a surge breaker?

Anavrin, yes it is I made it as part of our original pot still head along with the product shotgun condenser.

Details are here

viewtopic.php?f=15&t=3127

Cheers
Nick

I'm soooo jealous, don't suppose you could make any more?
I appreciate yours was probably a labour of love but the SD ones quite expensive, if you had the time and could do it cheaper than SD, I'd buy one

Sorry not planning on making anymore as they are quite time consuming and as you say it is a bit of a labour of love when doing it for yourself. Also at some point we really need to get back to finishing our steam engine and that will take up a lot of time. Problem is that work gets in the way of all these hobbies.

Cheers
Nick

I figured as much but thought I'd ask anyway

How many sight towers are you planning on bolting together? It might be more economical if you could stack the glass sections on top of each other within the same end plates like the crystal dragons, or get a longer section of glass that you could fit several plates inside.

My Baby CD sections are €30 each and the ends are about €140, so one section costs €170 but the six I have work out at just over €53 each, it gets more econimical the more sections you add without having to buy more ends.

The sight glass complete is £63 so we will either get another as we only want four plates or look to see if I can source a longer piece of glass. Just need to find some of the right diameter that will take the temperature + fluid splashing on it.

Already working on a mk3 version of the bubble cap plate to allow me to adjust the fluid level over the cap.

Cheers
Nick

I like the look of this.....
Is it difficult to make? Where did you get all the bits n bobs from?
Would it be cheeky to ask approximate cost?
S4BB

I've been looking at a couple of these....£33 a throw??? can't see how you can go wrong...and free P&P.
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/2-51MM-OD-Flo ... 3a8f9b292e

I've had kit from China before with no problems.