My EB Build thread - it's going to take some work!

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cscade

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Update 12/20/2012: --- New photos of the space now that it's "worn in" a bit and I got comfy! new photos

Thread highlights;

- Floor plan drawing
- Process, and more process
- Panel cutting and test assembly
- Panel layout, thread tapping, & painting
- Panel internal wiring shots
- Making a hole where the steam gets out, stops my mind from wondering - where it will go ...
- First photos of completed work
- More recent photos, after some use and evolution
- BCS-460 driven conical temp control panel

Original first post;

Now that my gas system is officially sold, work has begun full bore on building the electric brewery! It's not exactly a race to the finish, but I will be very happy when I have something to brew on again!

The room is in my basement, and will require a whole lot of prep work. I'm going to build out a full blown Kal clone... after looking into all the great designs out there it just really suits my style the best.

So, without further ado, let's begin!

A few "before" shots, as the room began:

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And today's progress:

The bricks are gone!

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The concrete contractor will arrive this saturday AM, and we'll begin the slab phase.
 
very ambitious! Going to sub and see how this turns out!

I notice the level of the grade is about on par with the door threshold leading out. Are you going to excavate down enough so the slab comes back up to the threshold level?
 
Thanks!

Yes, and no. There will be a rim that runs around the perimeter at door threshold height, and also an area to the left at the same height, where my ferment control chamber will end up. However the "work area" will be ~6" step down, with a draining floor.

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That room gives me the heeby-jeebies :( I hope you don't dig up anything unpleasant :S

I have a creepy cellar room too, so I envy your ambition!
 
That room gives me the heeby-jeebies :( I hope you don't dig up anything unpleasant :S

I have a creepy cellar room too, so I envy your ambition!

OMG THERE'S BODIES EVERYWHERE! :D

It's actually a much more promising space than the photos can convey. I'll be making it very nice. Lots of work involved, but I spent a significant portion of my life making old buildings awesome. So this is just a matter of time and effort! Stay tuned, and I'll help cure you of your heeby-jeebies.
 
The destruction is now way, way worse than the photos above show. Turns out that the main sewer line where it leaves the house under the foundation wall is completely shattered, but the main beyond it seems good. So there are a few contractors and a whole slew of amish kids in the basement, yelling Pennsylvania dutch at each other!

As bad as it all may seem, I would way rather know about this and fix it properly NOW, before pouring a concrete floor over a whole bunch of broken.

I'll post photos once the room isn't crammed with people ;)
 
Major progress!

The sewer lines were toast, now fully repaired, and the slab is poured!

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I have a few complaints, but mostly I'm happy. The floor doesn't drain quite the way I had hoped (water hangs around the edges 1/2" deep), and the stand pipe for the sink is in the wrong place by 3". I'm hoping it doesn't interfere with the sink leg. But, even with the significant amount of work they had to put into fixing the sewer pipe, which we had no idea about going in, they stuck to their quote and did all this for $2k.

Side note: We discovered through all this that we have a 6" sewer main, including all the interior piping under the basement floor. That's huge. I'm pretty sure I could flush a live groundhog, and that sucker would be GONE. :D
 
Major progress!
Side note: We discovered through all this that we have a 6" sewer main, including all the interior piping under the basement floor. That's huge. I'm pretty sure I could flush a live groundhog, and that sucker would be GONE. :D

Pics if you do it! :p
 
I wish I had the space/time/money to do this. I brew in the garage but the rest of the work goes happens on the second story of my house. I bet I have to make 20 trips up and down the steps on brew day.

Good news is, it healthier for me ;-) bad news is, I'm a lazy chubby guy!

I envy the OP (even if he did find dead bodies down there).
 
Looks awesome! I can see the brewery already. I am so looking for a sweet basement to do this with when I finally buy a house...
 
amazing what a difference the floor makes. doesn't look creepy anymore. I guess the dirt floor kind of gives off a "tomb" vibe...
 
If beer porn is illegal in your country, avert your gaze...

MoreBeer had the stainless head pumps in stock, so I made an out-of-order order along with all my QDs and valves.

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I love this project because i too have a creepy basement that I will be moving my brewing to soon. So it gives me hope
 
Brew room is wired, except for the main panel feed, I want to wait to place it until I have everything in hand so I can figure out location. I decided not to put up dairy panel or anything else on the walls. I plan to live here for many years to come, but I still felt like I should try to minimize the cost of things I can't take with me.

I started building the brew stand last night. I'm really stoked about how well and fast this is all coming along. I'm following Kal's design for the stand pretty much exactly, with a few tweaks to things like leg orientation, full countersinks on everything, etc.

I have this afternoon off to continue the build. I bought a floor standing drill press from Lowes yesterday, but they couldn't find it :drunk:

So I guess I'll pick that up later on. No hurry regardless, the panel won't be here for a while anyhow, not to mention the perpetually backordered blichmann kettles!

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I see your clamps have removable ends. It is great for turning the slide around and using to spread a wooden structure if needed. It is a great tool to have in some applications. Sorry to digress!!
 
I see your clamps have removable ends. It is great for turning the slide around and using to spread a wooden structure if needed. It is a great tool to have in some applications. Sorry to digress!!

I actually used them for exactly that on the bottom shelf yesterday. Handy indeed!

:mug:
 
New toy today. Got it all set up by myself, that was a challenge! Mighty heavy head. This will allow me to make nice clean holes in everything.

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Big few days of progress. Here's some random in-process shots!

Anyone have tips on getting NPT threaded connections to not leak? I'm having a hell of a time getting the sink to cooperate.

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Here's the latest:

Testing sink placement.
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Finished the "don't electrocute yourself with water" wall, painted the window and installed slide latches.
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This is the mounting bracket for the sink. It's extremely unstable free standing, and I didn't want to drill holes in it to mount it. So I devised this little bracket. The strip on the left gets tapconned to the wall, then the strip on the right gets attached with kreg screws. The sink slides into the groove from the right once it's all assembled on the wall.
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1st Part installed
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Look ma, no visible fasteners! It's extremely stable as well.
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Starting to assemble the stand.
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Some overall shots.
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I decided to mount my pumps directly to the stand, since with my room configuration they will not be in the way of movement. I would have to faceplant into the control panel to bump into them.

I used threaded studs for mounting.
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The finished install.
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:mug:
 
Bad *ss dungeon basement brewery! Looking great!

With your pumps mounted there, is the top leak-proof above them? I'd hat to see sticky wort get all into the pumps' sensitive bits.

Subscribed! Cheers! :mug:
 
No, not yet. I'm going to rig up some sort of deflection shield hidden up above the top pump inside the stand frame. That way if anything makes it through the top, it'll drip on the bottom shelf beside the pumps rather than into them.

Thanks! This is a super fun build. Now I need more parts to arrive!
 
Back on the wagon! Parts arrived yesterday, so it's time to continue the build. :D

Truly awesome and complete kit from Mike at Spike Innovations. That guy has to be some sort of Tetris grand champion the way the box was packed.

All I have had opportunity to do so far is unpack everything and JB weld the access plate. Let the build commence!

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Thanks! I'm an ex Structural Engineer (here is some of my work - you may have to "click to proceed to link destination") turned Software Engineer.

My budget for this build including the concrete and other construction that had to be done in the basement is $10k. It's looking like I'll come in much closer to $8k when it's all said and done however. I could have bought a prebuilt panel from Kal, as the workmanship is phenomenal, but the savings from purchasing the kit provided the funds to purchase the build tools, which I get to keep forever. So I decided to build it myself.

Great job so far! Are you an engineer? How much do you anticipate this build costing?
 
Had the whole day today to work on the panel, got a lot done! Considering I had zero metal working experience before this project, there have been a lot of surprises. For the most part, everything I thought would be easy has been hard, and everything I thought would be hard has been extremely simple.

For instance, I assumed the step bit and hole-saw holes would be cake, but they were very fiddly to do right. I spent most of my time setting up for holes rather than drilling them. In contrast, I thought the freehand holes (square and rectangular openings) would be very hard, and they were cake. I mean, a breeze. I had psyched myself all up that the jigsaw work was going to be hard and it wasn't at all.

A few random bits of wisdom I picked up today the hard way;

- Don't misinterpret the speed chart on your drill press... I was running my step bit at ~1k rpm, when I should have been at 400. 400 works much better!
- People say use plenty of cutting oil. What they mean is, use cutting oil multiple times per hole.
- Solid clamping is key. It was very hard to properly secure the work for each hole, so I ended up with a lot of "wood sandwiches", keeping everything in place. They don't show in the pictures, but the parts being drilled are nearly always backed by chunks of 2x4.

Drilling the clearance hole for the electric element in one of the element boxes. This picture is here mainly so that everyone who has proper drill press clamps can marvel at my ingenutiy in the face of having the wrong clamps ;)
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It was impossible to layout the 1/16 DIN and meter openings with pencil or marker - the margin for error is just too small. So I dropped tape on the surface, did my layout on it, and then razor knifed the layout at the exact locations of the desired cut, and removed the tape where the cutout should be. This made for very easy to follow contrast while running the jigsaw.
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Fully laid out panel, ready for cutting.
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The first meter in place! I was paranoid, so I undercut. If you do the same thing and need to enlarge the opening - don't be scared - use the jigsaw to open it up. Just follow the edge and carefully angle the blade to open the cut rather than work at it with a file. I found the file ineffective for all but the smallest errors. The meters are all snug - you can't get a sheet of paper into the opening next to the device. Waterjet cutters, eat your heart out :D
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An in-process shot of the 22mm holes. This took hours - much longer than the square/rectangular openings.
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The cut front panel.
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Components all test fit. The extra blue mark is because I modified Kal's panel layout.
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Top of panel ground and sanded.
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Bottom layout for receptacles.
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Bottom holes all milled.
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And I'll leave you with a "Kal Style" shot, in respect for the man :mug:
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Moving right along!

Drilled & tapped the backplane, got all the components mounted. Look at that pile of poor neglected nuts!
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Getting ready to drill the mouting holes for the power receptacles, showing cutting oil.
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Tapping mounting holes as I go.
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Primer coat on assembled panel (Rust-Oleum self-etching primer). The entire panel was sanded with 220 grit before priming, to rough up the original paint.
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Top shot, waiting for a heatsink!
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Bottom shot, receptacles installed. XLR jacks not mounted yet, waiting on the appropriate bit to come from amazon for the #4 tap.
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Front. All assembled! I'm leaving off the labels until the paint has another 24 hours to cure. It's still outgassing.
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And a final beauty shot. The paint color I chose is Rust-Oleum hammered "dark bronze". There's very little bronze in it, I think it looks awesome. The paint can decided to only work upside-down about 2 minutes into the paint job. That was fun!
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I don't think so. Originally I had planned to frame out the walls, and put up white "dairy panel". However, once the concrete was in and the budget started to come more into focus I realized I had to make some cuts.

So, I adopted a "if I can't take it with me, it has to be cheap" bottom line, and put all the money into things I can transport away whenever I move. I washed the walls down and they are actually a nice glazed tile, they just had a bunch of crap on them.

If I paint, it will bubble and look like crap after a few years, and these old walls were not designed to be sealed anyhow ... especially not on the inside surface only.

Do you have plans to paint the walls of your brew space?
 
I've spent the past few available brewery-time slots working on wiring. It certainly takes a minute to get the hang of planning the wire lengths, and it took me a little while to get the differences between my layout and Kal's straight so I wasn't running wires to the wrong relays!

I now have all the high and low voltage wiring complete, with the exception of the SSR-related wire, as the heatsink has not yet arrived. The great news is, I should have all the rest of the major components tomorrow, including the kettles!

I'm still going back and forth about the anodes in the kettles. I bought 2 of them, but I just can't decide if I want to use them or not. I know I want zero corrosion, but I also want fewer holes in the kettles and I'm (perhaps irrationally) concerned about the presence of the anodes in contact with the brewing process.

Bottom all labeled up, with XLR jacks mounted. It was surprisingly easy to tap for those tiny screws.
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Front with tags on. My brewery tag doesn't get applied until everything in the panel is done.
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Guts!
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Back of the door. The omega timer was definitely the most unpleasant item to wire. That upside-down socket sucks.
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And an overall. Cheers!
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Awesome wiring job inside of that panel. I can only hope to keep mine looking somewhat in control compared to that. I really like the panel color as well.
 
Moving right along!

Drilled & tapped the backplane, got all the components mounted. Look at that pile of poor neglected nuts!
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Getting ready to drill the mouting holes for the power receptacles, showing cutting oil.
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Tapping mounting holes as I go.
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Primer coat on assembled panel (Rust-Oleum self-etching primer). The entire panel was sanded with 220 grit before priming, to rough up the original paint.
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Top shot, waiting for a heatsink!
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Bottom shot, receptacles installed. XLR jacks not mounted yet, waiting on the appropriate bit to come from amazon for the #4 tap.
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Front. All assembled! I'm leaving off the labels until the paint has another 24 hours to cure. It's still outgassing.
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And a final beauty shot. The paint color I chose is Rust-Oleum hammered "dark bronze". There's very little bronze in it, I think it looks awesome. The paint can decided to only work upside-down about 2 minutes into the paint job. That was fun!
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Looking nice! I like the beer glass too!
 
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