My copper hopper build

I decided to motorize my grain mill. In the process, I also decided to build a new hopper. For the last three years I have been using a hopper made from poster board (heavy paper). It has worked well, but it is time for a change. I am about half way through this build and am very happy on how it is going. Attached are a few pictures.




Laser print picture in negative and iron onto copper.
Etch in ferric chloride, 45 to 60 minutes.
Clean.



Now submerge in liver of sulfur for a couple minutes.

Beautiful....nice work!!

Looks great!

Thanks guys.

I will update when there is more progress. The fun stuff is done. Need to add some trim and do a bunch of soldering.

Some progress today. Soldered the cone and added 1/4 inch copper tube for trim around the top. Solder skills leave a lot to be desired. The trim really adds a lot of stability to the hopper. Used a dremel tool metal saw disk to cut a groove in the tube. Then slid it on the hopper and soldered. It was more difficult than it sounds. Needs some clean up. Still more to do to finish it, but here it is today.

Now that is beautiful. Great job!!!

wow, this is old school class!

That is classy, nice job.

May be the best hopper I've seen. Beautiful work.

very nice.

Here it is, finished. Also some pictures of the mill it is going on. Will be brewing next week and will post some pictures of the hopper on the mill along with my motorization conversion. Really want to know how much grain it will hold. Guessing about 20 lbs.



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Love it!

That is the nicest hopper I've seen yet!

Great work. Wish I knew how to work copper like that.

G-Hog said:

Great work. Wish I knew how to work copper like that.

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Don't worry about that. Everything I know about it comes from watching Jim Tom build a still on the Moonshiners show on Discovery. :rockin:

Copper, as it turns out, is pretty forgiving.

Great work. That is a kick-ass looking mill as well. I bet it gets the job done without much effort.

masskrug said:

Great work. That is a kick-ass looking mill as well. I bet it gets the job done without much effort.

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It does OK, but after grinding over 1,000 lbs by hand I decided to add a motor. Unfortunately, the big cast iron wheel has been replaced with a pully.

That is a thing of beauty. The finished product is amazing.

Wow... Good looking hopper

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Here is the completed hopper on the motorized mill. It holds 23 lbs as shown in the pictures below. It was a lot of fun to build, and I am very happy with how it turned out. Works great as well. Thanks for all your kind comments and likes.

This all started when my daughter was home from college at Christmas. I proudly showed her my motorized mill, and commented on how steam punk it looked. She just laughed at the paper hopper. A discussion then ensued on doing something a little more in character for the hopper. This was the result.

WOW, well done sir, well done.
Uhm, what's up with that boot?

Beautiful! What did you use the copper square for?

Steampunk? Hm - you could paint the pulleys something appropriate.

Flat black would be easiest. Hammered bronze might be more interesting. Rustoleum has spray paints with the hammered metal look in various metal tones.

Pulley and belt shields are always a good idea and they could also be decorated

Inkleg said:

Uhm, what's up with that boot?

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Ha, lawn ornament, if I lived in Florida instead of Texas it would have been a pink flamingo.

Tomcat0304 said:

Beautiful! What did you use the copper square for?

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It was a test piece. I have not etched copper this way before, so I did everything with that piece before doing the hopper. Helped to get the timing right.

Epimetheus said:

Steampunk? Hm - you could paint the pulleys something appropriate.

Flat black would be easiest. Hammered bronze might be more interesting. Rustoleum has spray paints with the hammered metal look in various metal tones.

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Good idea, I will think about that.