stand up freezer ferment chamber conversion

So santa came early this year for me. A reletive mentioned he had a stand up freezer that he wanted out. Heck he even dropped it off at my house for free. Looking at it I had a bad feeling. I noticed it has coils in the shelves.
Now there is no way i'm going to turn down a free working freezer. If I mess it up it only costed me some time.
I quicky hit the internet for any info on converting one of these. There isn't much out there. Most people poo poo the idea of even trying. I did however find one thread on another site with a picture of it being done. INSPIRATION!.
I thought I would put some more info out there for anyone wanting to attemp this.
This is a quick story on how I did it. Here it is

Things I learned from the many stories of failed attempts is. Don't kink the lines. Don't puncture the lines. The biggest hint to do this without hurting the lines is to cut all of the little bars that run across the shelves to free up each coil. This gives them much more flexability.
They are pretty tough, wire cutters didn't do the trick. Niether did some very heavy duty ones. I found that a dremel with plenty of fiber cut off wheels does the trick. I went through around 20 or so of those discs cutting up the 2 shelves. they create alot of dust that you probably dont want to breath so i wore a dust mask. once they were all cut i sat there thinking and planning how i was goin to bend the lines out of the way with the least chance of kinking a line.
First i cut some factory zip ties holding lines together. Then i removed the factory thermostat that was screwed to one of the shelves. I carefully moved it out of the way to reinstall later.
Looking at the way the shelfs are bent I did not want to bend them in a way that would make the factory 90 degree bends more acute and risk a kink. I planned my bends so they would either be opening up those angles or twisting. That meant the top shelf was going to bend up to the right and the next one down was going to bend up and back.
Now i had a plan. My next little bit of insurance was a small butane torch and gloves. I used the torch to heat up the area that i wanted to bend and gloves to keep from being burned. I tried to not get greedy with my bends. I worked one or 2 bends at a time. I needed just a little more slack on the top and the bottom to get everything up against the walls. I did a little more cutting on the very top most grate and the bottom shelf.
Once everything was cut and bent were i wanted, i screwed the thermostat back into place. Then the moment of truth plug her in and keep my fingers crossed. Everything worked!
A quick clean and this is what it looks like.

I took some zip ties and tied everything down and added my DIY ebay aqaurium temperature controller and there she is


It can be done :rockin:

since i just looked this up for someone on another post I figured I would add some more detail.
Its been working great for this past year. I put a piece of 3/4 plywood on top of the bottom shelf when I use it, to avoid freezing anything.
I also wired in a small desk fan to the top set of coils to circulate the air when the freezer kicks on. I just piggy backed it with the freezer on my controller.