Jockey box coil?

[Hefty]

Hi all,
I had some spare time in the shed the other day and I was experimenting with making a coil with some left over copper pipe I had. I was originally going to use it for a different purpose (That shall remain nameless [emoji6]) but it wasn't quite long enough or skinny enough for that use.

It's 6mm ID, 8mm OD and about 4 or 5m of length has been made into a double layer coil about 110mm long by 70mm wide.
My question: can anyone with experience with these kind of things tell me if this would be enough length and surface area to make a decent jockey box coil? I would just "suck it and see" but if anyone can tell me straight up "Yes" or "no" I might save some $, time and frustration.
Cheers!
Jono.

 

[MHB]

In very short NO, as for why...
Odds on you are too young to remember 1&2 cent pieces, and how they taste, but those who do will know copper isn't a good taste, especially not in beer.
Beer has a pH around 4-4.2 enough acid to ensure you get plenty in your beer.
The other problem (apart from your beer tasting like shit) is that part of the design of a cooling coil is to get a pretty big pressure drop over the coil/plate. To keep the fizz in warm beer, say you want 4.5g/L of CO2 at 20oC you need about 175kPa, to get the same carbonation at 4oC you need about 65kPa. You need about 110kPa of dynamic pressure drop across your coil. I would be surprised if you are getting 10kPa across that coil.
If you set up the one you have, you wont be able to either keep the fizz in the warm beer or control the flow of the cool beer

Not a bad bit of bending there, did you pack the pipe with something before shaping? Fine dry sand is the standard, tho some people use salt.
Mark

 

[Hefty]

Thanks Mark. That will save me the $, time and frustration i was talking about!
Yeah, I was going to fill it with salt so that any that didn't pour out would dissolve out, but we didn't have enough salt so I used bi carb. It did the trick for the bending but it didn't dissolve out as easily as I expected. It took a lot of stuffing around to drain as much as I could, then try to boil it out, etc. In the end I hooked up my compressor and shot it out down my driveway! Then I rinsed it as thoroughly as I could and the job was done.
Cheers,
Jono.