The Neverending Single tier electric brewstand build

So, I make what amounts to an amalgamation of a lot of the brewstand builds I really like on this forum. The only thing I really liked that I'm not doing is the built in tipping frames (which is brilliant).

So, original Sketchup drawings:





and this, which was my original plan for the burner supports. Currently I'm not really sure what I'm going to do in that area. I may still do this. No idea yet.

So, I stopped at the local welding shop and asked Steve to order me two 24' sticks of 16 gauge 1.5" square box tubing. Took a couple weeks, went up with my cutlist for 20 cuts, paid him 70 bucks and I was on my merry way 2 miles back to my parents house where I actually have room to work on projects like this.

Tragically, the MIG was almost out of gas, so the first night of work was a bunch of extremely fast welding trying to get as many inches of weld as possible out of the ~4% remaining argon/co2 left in the tank.


I got the top frame finished except for capping the ends. Bottom frame is done except for one end, which I had just enough gas to make two really ugly tacks. Just need to grab some gas on monday and then I can start welding in the uprights.

Then I just need to weld the caster plates and studs on, make a filter mount and weld in the pump mount studs. I'll probably cap off the 8 open pipe ends last, because it's going to take a fair amount of shaping with the grinder to make them pretty.

Then I get to grind every weld flush so I can paint it, which will take a lot of grinding.

Then I get to spend hundreds of dollars on doing the electric setup


My race against the welding gas made my welds pretty ugly, but they burned in well and they'll get ground off anyway. If I see any porosity after grinding flush, I'll reweld any joint that needs it. There are at least 3 that I know didn't burn in as well as I'd like, but MIG is forgiving so it's grinding and reburning time. I'm sure drinking a couple beers while I was in the garage didn't help at all.


Coming soon; more welding, more grinding, etc. Work starts up again on the 11th, and then I'll have money to start collecting everything for the actual electronics build. In the mean time, I'm strongly considering throwing two burners under there just so I can brew a few times while I'm building the control panel and such.

The electric setup, as of now is going to be 1200 watt RIMS, 5500 watt RIPP elements in the BK and HLT, two pumps and no hardlines.
Control panel will be fairly spartan, no built in timer or alarms.
In the future I'm going to experiment with using a RIMS tube to heat a home made water jacket for the MLT, but that's going to be hugely expensive so it's going to wait.


That was the plan as of a couple weeks ago. Since then I've realized that running a 5500 watt element wide open in the BK would be a little silly, so I'm either going to put in another PID controller and use it as straight duty cycle control, or put a 3500 watt-ish element in the BK opposite the 5500 and a direct switch for each. I don't really like either of those ideas though, in all honesty.

Two pumps seems strange, but the "clean pump" (which really won't be the clean water pump occasionally, but that's what I was considering it when I made the control panel layout) will be hugely useful for double brewdays, pumping around sanitizer and cleaning solution during the mash, and for pumping over HLT liquid while recirculating or draining the MLT. I batch sparge, but it'll give me the option of fly sparging if I ever get the urge, too.

Yeah UGLY welds alright.

You need to see my brew tree welds. If mine looked like yours, I wouldn't have went through so many grinding wheels. They are holding, but so much work! Welds like your's, I would have just wire brushed and painted over them to show that I can weld (which I can't). I just stick two pieces together, and grind like a mad man.


Nice job!

Well, it's still not Monday, so I can't go get welding gas, but my older brother and I built up a stand/transport stand for our little brother's project car. It's a pain trying to move around a shell when we need garage space. This is much easier.
Ended up stick welding it with a big miller diesel mobile (that we actually sold about 2 hours after finishing this project).









Yeah, it's totally unrelated to the project, but it's a good excuse for why the brewstand isn't welded together yet.

Well, an hour of welding and this is where I'm at currently. All the structural stuff is done!

Tomorrow will be water filter mount, keg supports and capping the tubing. Then I've got to decide how I'm doing the control panel mount.

That is a great idea, I have had many projects I have had to shuffle to make room for another, incuding my brew rig. the stand looks good too. BTW what kind of car is that? I have been looking for a new dream car ever since i sold my GT6.

It's a '73 Opel GT. It's in really amazing shape in terms of body straightness/rust/rot, but it's obviously undergoing a pretty long restoration. It's just such a pain to move around a stripped shell otherwise.

Love Opel's. Great Lines.

3rd afternoon of work and I made some more progress!

Started capping all the tube ends, as well as putting in my water filter mount.



One of the tube ends in the process of being capped. I went between doing bodywork style spotwelds and just running beads. Generally, running a nice wide, hot bead let me grind more flush if the cap was a little proud of the surface.


A reasonable cap. I could have spent a lot more time on them, but these are good enough to cover up the +/- 1/8th inch difference in the cuts on the tubing (heavy drinking).


That left me with this.




Next I started doing the keg supports/tabs/whatever


MLT tabs are done!


Wednesday I'll be doing the rest of the tabs, followed by the chiller mount (haven't decided on the location) and the damned control panel mount setup. That one's going to take some thinking on, because I want it to be removable and to swing.

Oh, and this was the super fun cramped space I had to work in today to the left of the tractor.

Putting power steering on our Farmall M

Awesome job! I love the car hauler, great idea with being able to add the larger tire on the back!

Id be interested to see how the Opel turns out, they are beautiful cars!

Well, I'm still lacking in productivity recently. I threw a coat of paint on the top of the stand to keep it from rusting for the time being.


Also finally cut out my other two kegs with a cobbled together grinder jig.



There are screws in odd places because I realized that I needed space for the clamp bolts