anyone ever make their own plastic conical?

i know some people buy the conical storage containers like the ones at usplastic, but has anyone ever made their own by means of heating and forming. im sure it would be possible to just take a 6.5 ale pale and heat the bottom then vacuum it into a mold. strength may be an issue so maybe it would be possible to use a thicker food storage barrel of some sort. ive never heard of anyone doing this and was just curious if anyone would think it might work. i have a cnc router and could make the mold out of mdf. feel free to call me a stupid idiot.

Give it a shot, I don't know how many people around here would have the experience to do that. If you do it post some pics!

YOu are a stupid idiot.



Wow. That was not as much fun as I thought it would be.

Anyway, I would imagine forming plastic could be a bit of a challenge, depending on the type of plastic. The trick would be in heating it to the proper temp, slowly enough, and having the tools to bend it without cooling it.

If you have some experience in this sort of thing, it would be an interesting project. My experience with molding plastic is that getting all of these things to come together at home would be very difficult.

I HAVE thought about figuring out how to turn a water cooler jug upside down and use as a conical. It might be easier to modify the opening to accept a valve of some sort to allow the trub to drain off. But I imagine you might need to heat and stretch the upper portion to make it slope less gradually.

It would seem the better bottle people with all their plastic molding capabilities would make an upsidedown cone end betterbottle that a valve could thread on to and have the appropriate shape. A simple bucket based stand and everyone could have a conical.

ok so my response got me thinking, and I looked up better bottles FAQ and found:
" . . make a PET conical fermenter? – Large-scale, conical fermenters, used in conjunction with filters, are definitely effective; however, on a small scale, things do not work out so well. We tested a prototype of a transparent, PET conical in our development lab and we saw what cannot be seen in opaque conicals. Fine particles settle on the sloping walls of the conical section and remain "stuck" there, until the liquid level reaches them during racking. Then, they contaminate the clarified wine or beer. Racking was not nearly as clean as it is with our standard carboys and racking adapters. There is a reason for drawing clarified wine or beer from above the sediment during small-scale racking. Nevertheless, a conical made of our PET would have many advantages compared to conicals made from polyethylene, polypropylene, or polyvinyl chloride. The PET conical would be essentially impermeable to oxygen, would not stain, would not add or transfer flavors, would be transparent, and would be a great deal easier to clean. Unfortunately, a PET conical would also cost more, making it quite impractical in view of the fact that Better-Bottle racking-carboys perform better in any case."

uhh, so what if a thin layer of trub stayed behind? the idea is to get most of the trub out for yeast harvesting and clarity. What are they waiting for? Maybe if their racking arm was a little longer it would not pick up the side trub.

Well, I guess it would be possible to make it with a vaccuform rig. take a nice sheet of plastic the correct thickness and such, heat it up with heat lamps and then suck it down into the mold with a vacuum pump.

The hard part will be figuring out what thickness of plastic and such you will need to create the correct size fermentor.

My minibrew conical is 3x as thick as an ale bucket. I can't imagine that you could do this with an ale pale.

For proof of concept that would probably be fine. I'd love to see it done, and maybe he's got the next best thing in homebrewing. If the walls are thin - maybe the stand makes up for the rigidity in terms of support?

Good Luck.

-OCD

Heating up a sheet of plastic in your oven is easy.

The difficulty comes with finding a mold and dealing with the deep draw. You would need to make a square frame to hold the sheet then lower it over the mold. I think it would take quite a bit of vacuum to get the job done.


P.S. I worked at a thermoforming shop in high school and had a job selling sheet a coupla careers back.

What about a thick (real thick) bag corner?
And some kind of male/female connection on the bottom.
Male goes inside bag, female screws over and allows for a valve to be placed.
All this goes in a bucket with bottom cut out.
Lid goes over bag and holds the weight of contents.

Dunno, I am very new to this. So if it is a stupid idea then tell me.

greeneyed said:

What about a thick (real thick) bag corner?
And some kind of male/female connection on the bottom.
Male goes inside bag, female screws over and allows for a valve to be placed.
All this goes in a bucket with bottom cut out.
Lid goes over bag and holds the weight of contents.

Dunno, I am very new to this. So if it is a stupid idea then tell me.

Click to expand...

That is actually a pretty damned good idea!!! Easy to clean, just replace the bag!!

Most plastic conicals are spin molded which keeps the thickness the same throughout.
I like your bag idea, but think that yeast would get caught up in the folds of the bag unless the bag was cone shaped. That might kill the yeast due to lack of nutrients. Don't know about that though. If it did kill some of the yeast then you would pick up off flavors from the yeast.

I worked at DuPont plant for few years. I made Plastic 55 gal drums. I would have say that your idea is pretty much impossible without very costly equipment. You would need the plastic to be almost liquid. Not going happen in your garage with a heat gun. Next you'd need an air tight vacuum not going to happen with a shop vac.

Beta,

I agree with LarMoeCur. I work in the pool industry and we injection mold a lot of parts but we also have some blow molded parts.

What you would like to do is kind of like blow molding in reverse. More like vacuum form molding but for the sake of argument.

Here is the issue, an ale pale is already a certain thickness on the bottom. Once you heat the plastic (assuming you can heat it evenly enough and keep it the right temp while forming) when you go to pull a vacuum on it, the plastic is going to stretch. Think of putty or playdoh. If you hold one side tight and pull on the other, what happens to the middle? (it becomes VERY thin). I think this will be an issue.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for experimenting but I just wanted to make you aware of what you might see. There are a few places where you can find a way to make your own vacuum molding machine (such as instructables). I remember one that was using heat bands from a baseboard heater or something like that but it was using sheets.

One thing that might be interesting is to try using pourable plastic from smooth-on. I'm sure by the time you invest the money in the raw materials and the mold, you'll have over $100 for a 10 gallon fermenter but at the end of the day you could say "I made that".

Hope this post doesn't discourage you. Let us know if/how you proceed if you plan on trying it.

I tracked down a really nice 11" dia. HDPE funnel, and then I started reading up on gluing HDPE... not possible. Polyethylene is pretty much impossible to glue, unfortunately. Oh well.

Well I'll be damned... all hail the magic links at the bottom of the post.... found this linked from one of the threads:

$50 DIY conical
http://www.thebrewingnetwork.com/fo...&start=0&sid=bf8e407d9b7b8ce7a7db56719ecd032b

now that there is all this attention im going to have to try. i have done some vacuum forming before so i think ive got the hang of it. it would probably be better if i use a container that has rounded edges so its a better transition from the sides to the cone. there is a guy here locally that sells a multitude of food shipping containers so i should be able to find something. i have to go out of town but once i get back......its on like donkey kong.

Couldn't see any pictures in that link but I was thinking about this as I read this thread. What about making a circular cut out the bottom of an ale pail and placing a food-grade funnel in the bottom? The funnel would need some sort of rim that could rest on the cut out opening in the pail and then you could seal it with food-grade silicone. Then you could attach whatever type of valve you want at the bottom of the funnel. Not sure if it would hold up to the pressure but I think it should. The real question is whether or not the silicone would be able to secure the funnel to the pail. You would have to make sure the funnel is very secure and has a snug fit otherwise you will get beer everywhere but this could be doable.

greeneyed said:

What about a thick (real thick) bag corner?
And some kind of male/female connection on the bottom.
Male goes inside bag, female screws over and allows for a valve to be placed.
All this goes in a bucket with bottom cut out.
Lid goes over bag and holds the weight of contents.

Dunno, I am very new to this. So if it is a stupid idea then tell me.

Click to expand...

You been in prison? My dad used to have inmates working for him and they would brew up Pruno in everything from plastic bags to rubber waders.

To take hezagenius' idea a step further, an o-ring and a few bolts around the periphery of the funnel/bucket interface might keep the seal a bit better than silicone