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[stillvodka]

[quote:punkin wrote

A good recipe would be a 1500 mm x 50mm column packed with copper mesh and with a 50mm outlet above it reducing after a 45 or 90 degree bend to a 3/4 stainless ball or gate valve. An extra 250mm of column on top of that with a 200mm double wound coil condenser. I've been building 800mm 3/4 by 1" liebig condensers for the product, but i think that may be overkill.

That's all there is to a basic vm.[/quote]

My last still was offset Stone Nixon ''cactus'', but having been reading up here and other sites, there are now slant plates? and also the ones Minime uses with long product coolers and big gate/ball valves, this is new to me, that's apart from the Amphora PDA1 I had, that had a tiny one on it. I would like to know the measurements where things have to go if possible, I have been given 1500mm of 3''stainless tubing and 4 feet square stainless steel sheet that I want to make my own design boiler from, I have height limitations, I need to build a low level boiler, the sheet is a bit heavy to work with at 1.2mm thick, but for nothing I am not going to moan!

[rpd69]

Both the Liquid Management (LM) slanted plate design, and the Vapor Management (VM) port and gate valve outlet, have reflux returned to the column from the top by a reflux cooler mounted above the head/outtake.

As the name suggests, the LM manages the product-rate and subsequent reflux by controlling the off-take in LIQUID form through a small needle valve.

The VM controls the off-take in VAPOR form through a bigger gate-valve, and uses a simpler design for the head. The VM seems to be the superior design, both because it's relatively simple to build, and because it is very easy to run and obtain top-notch product with.

Heres a pic of my VM-setup as an example:



The reflux coil on the floor goes into the tube above the head, and the head is just as basic as it looks. Simply a valve-controlled vapor outlet. My design is tweaked a bit in appearance from the norm for personal overkill preferences, but it illustrates the point. Change out the head inbetween the column and the reflux coil with a slanted plate LM head as I built over in this thread:

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=686

And you've got yourself an LM rig. Of course, the outlet in my LM-head there is not connected to a small needle valve for control of product and reflux rate yet, but you'll get the point and the differences in management principle.

And as always, there's about a million ways to tweak and adapt the designs, but I would suggest that you use 120-150 cm's for the column alone, and get hold of about 50-80 cm's more tube for the head and reflux coil tube.

Read up and look at pictures before you build

[stillvodka]

With the Amphora PDA1 still, there is a disc soldered in there with a 1/2 inch tube in the centre pretruding 1/2 to 3/4 of a inch up and down, to me this looks the same setup as you have, but only having half a disc and it's being put on a slant, am I thinking correct.

[rpd69]

I'm not familiar with the PDA-design, but it sounds like an LM head with the overflow returned to the column by the centre tube.

Several designs leads to the same basic principle of operation. The slanted plate LM head is popular because it is easy to build and solder, with only sawing slanted partial cuts in the tube and then inserting and soldering pre-shaped elliptical plates to guide the liquid from the cooler. My design over at my thread is more involved, as I've added a guide-plate for the rising vapor below the upper slanted plate, and the internal reflux tube to the lower plate. But Mud gives a good description of how it's usually done in a post there.

Read up.

[stillvodka]

Yes, the slant plate still head is the same as the PDA1, the disc sits in the center of the top coller soldered all way round, product out let cooler sits above the disc, thermometer sits below, very very similar in design, ones slanted the other flat, I would find it easier building PDA 1 design, I think that's the one I am going to build, but with a few modification, the PDA1 I had would blow product out through the top cap, to me it needed a longer condenser shell with bigger helix condensing coil .

The one pictured here, is of the PDA-2