Has anyone ever made their own Plate Chiller?

I don't see why it would be so difficult. I have seen the commercial versions that dissemble for cleaning. Why hasn't some made one for home brew?

I can't imagine that the cost of materials and the amount of effort involved would make it a fruitful DIY project.

It's doable and I even worked on the design some, but having the plates punched out and custom gaskets made is very cost prohibitive for how many you'd have to have done.

The gasket shown in the pic is showing some diverter "fingers" to keep the pass length longer but it isn't really necessary as long as the plates are over a foot long. The challenge here is keeping the outside gaskets from blowing out between the plates if you run too much pressure in the cooling side.

It sounds like one of those projects that would require a certain amount of assembly precision that would be difficult to make it DIY.

However I could see someone doing it and taking it over board and making the plates huge to increase flow and decrease chill time. Maybe.

I was thinking if you had access to a CNC machine even a simple one you could cut the plates for flat walls and use a bevel for the seals instead of o rings.

I wish I had a CNC machine to test my ideas on even just 2 plates would be enough to test with.

i have CNC and Laser access. need any help?

my friend and I thought about using the chill plate in a jockey box he was given. we never ended up trying it, not sure how well that would work....

The top and bottom plate would need to be pretty thick and have drilled or slotted tabs sticking out around the circumference to receive the clamping bolts. You could probably put four bolts directly through the chiller, but then the gasket would have to have circular seals cut into it to keep liquids out of there.

I'm not following you on the bevel for seals thing. The internal plates have to be really thin to work so I can't see any way you'd get away without using gaskets.

I was thinking that it would be easy to mill .5" inch aluminum sheets into the plates. Thinner would be better to start, really you would be cutting the path into the sheet, then stacking the plates, rotating each one 180 degrees so that it goes wort, water, wort, water. I think McMaster Carr sells the high temp silicone as sheets as well and that could be cut to fix the outside seal between each layer. The only important seal on the inside would be separating the wort and water, as long as the water and wort path are restrictive enough there is no need to have a perfect seal on the inside. I will try to design an example later tonight.


As far as bolting it together, the first and last layers are over sized with maybe a steel reinforcement layer and bolts on the corners to pull it all right together.

Be nice, first time using sketchup and in bed, with my mouse on a book.

http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=235a009eaaa2956078060da0cc5e23a8&prevstart=0

same Idea as the above picture, just reverse each plate every tier, top and bottom are the ones that need threads, shouldnt be to hard, flat silocone with holes punched in all four locations should work fine for a seal, and clamp it down with bolts and a steel plate at top and bottom