Aw nuts. Bought a couple weird old carboys

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TimpanogosSlim

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Went to a yard sale. House that used to be the home of a vintner, back when much of that neighborhood was vineyards.

Bought two carboys for $10/ea. Nice blueish glass (old?), weird neck that supports a screw cap i will probably never find, and torn shipping labels indicating that they originally held nitric acid.

18 liters of nitric to be precise. Or 4.75 gallons.

Unless my reference jug holds more that i thought (guess i should weigh it) these won't quite hold 5 gallons.
 
TimpanogosSlim said:
Went to a yard sale. House that used to be the home of a vintner, back when much of that neighborhood was vineyards.

Bought two carboys for $10/ea. Nice blueish glass (old?), weird neck that supports a screw cap i will probably never find, and torn shipping labels indicating that they originally held nitric acid.

18 liters of nitric to be precise. Or 4.75 gallons.

Unless my reference jug holds more that i thought (guess i should weigh it) these won't quite hold 5 gallons.
Click to expand...

They might hold more than you think. Often the listed volume capacity of carboys is to the shoulder, and they can actually hold more. Check out some of the carboy marking threads to see what I mean.
 
Alright. I dried out my empty HDPE vinegar jug, weighed it on my gram scale (3.77oz), and carefully filled it until it weighed a total of 137.21oz on my bigger digital scale. Then waited for it to settle, marked with a sharpie, and used that as a reference to graduate one of the new carboys.

And it turns out that they just barely hold 5 gallons. Like an inch or so from the neck.

So i have two beautiful blue glass 5 gallon secondaries. That works.
 
Make five gals of a barleywine or something, then put it into this 4.75 gal deal for long bulk aging. Maybe after trub loss you have the perfect amount to fill these things up to the tip-top.
 
redid my calibration and it looks like 5g is right at the big collar on the neck. if I'm lucky.

close enough i guess

FWIW my chemist friend tells me that industrial nitric acid almost always contains mercury salts that tend to cling to the walls of glass carboys, so, he recommended that i clean the interior with an EDTA-based cleaner such as lime-away. So I'll probably do that.
 

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