Welding A Sleeve On An Urn?

[Truman42]

Just been thinking about an idea to increase my batch size.

Would it be possible to weld a sleeve around the top of my urn to increase it from 18 litres up to 25 litres approx by increasing the wall height?

Could you foresee any problems doing this? I get a fairly decent rolling boil so think the element would still be able to keep this boil going.

 

[MHB]

Considering how thin urns are and how difficult the welding would be I would suggest you sell your existing urn and buy a 40 L jobbie. They arent all that expensive and the conversion done properly would probably cost more.
Mark

 

[Truman42]

Fair enough..I thought I would ask the question. I could probably get the welding done on the cheap but didnt know if it was soemthing easy to do or not.

 

[TidalPete]

If the price of getting the ss rolled to shape, top edge folded, & silver soldered on makes it economical then I say go for it.

TP

 

[Phoney]

+1 on getting a 40L urn instead.

If you want to turn your 20L jobbie into something more, mash in a separate vessel and use it as a HLT.

 

[Diesel80]

Truman,

reading your thread the other day i see you now have 2x 18L urns.

Surely selling both of these for going rate second hand would allow you either to:
1) purchase a 40L by chipping in extra coin
2) purchase a 40-60L Aluminium pot + craftbrewer style element (probably with change left over).

And be able to brew 23L high gravity scottish ales with much less f*cking about.
Equipment is cheap compared to the time spent f*cking about with less than optimal solutions.

You can always get more gear, but you can't get more time!

I went straight from a 15L pot to a 80L pot for this very reason. It has only been a little over 40L full 2x but it still makes beer, and i can leave it unattended and it wont boil over for a 1.060 beer 28L batch.

Sell the urns, get a pot + weldless element / gas burner and enjoy more beer for less time investment.

Cheers,
D80

 

[Truman42]

Well it turns out that one of our service providers does Tig welding, which I didnt know.
They are going to have a look at my urn but said it shouldnt be a problem adding on a sleeve to increase the size. They are going to do this FOC as Ive pumped about $50K of work their way in the past 6 months doing mods to our GET, which is a win for me.

I will eventually buy a 40 litre urn but this should help me get 20 litre batches in the mean time.

Should there be any problems with the element not being able to keep a rolling boil with the increase in volume? Im assuming not as Im only increasing the height not the diameter as well.

 

[Maheel]

it's going to take longer to boil and not be as strong a boil as your increasing volume of liquid

how long etc is variable in lots of ways .

insulating the urn will help it along no matter what you do

if it's costing "nothing" get them to go a bit higher to say 30L then you have plenty of room

 

[Diesel80]

Well, free certainly does change things.

Get them to do both urns then you have the ability to split a batch and end up with a normal 23L brew.
Then you will be sweet.

Cheers,
D80

 

[hirns]

Look at similar diameter s/s pots. I was going to join two Big W 19L $20 pots by spot welding and then silver soldering (after cutting the bottom out of one) to make a cheap 40l S/S pot but scored a keg to use instead. The good thing about pots is they usually have a slight champer to sit inside each other so if you find something close and you can ten measure down the side to get the same diameter. In addition you then have the lid for your coller!



Hirns

 

[Yob]

take the elements out of both and fit them to a keg... make a falsie from the top of the keg

boom

but I love tinkering with shite.. I still may do something similar soon, just as an experiment and coz I have an extra rubberised keg laying about.