Friday, January 21, 2011

The Frame

Back when we were designing our system, we were plagued with decisions on where to allocate our money.  We were upgrading from a relatively simple extract system consisting of a turkey burner and pot and the thought of shelling out over a $1000 for a new system was hard to stomach.  In the end though, although there are one or two things that I might have done differently, I think we made wise decisions and I’m very happy with the choices we made.

At one point, we were considering recycling some old bed frame bars and piecing together the frame on the cheap, but I’m glad that we abandoned that idea relatively quickly and decided to with an all-steel frame.  We designed it using 1.5” standard steel square tubing with dimensions tailored to our burner and kettle widths.  We were fortunate enough to have our friend’s dad offer to weld it together for us, and being a welder by trade, the quality is great and it turned out better than we hoped for.

Before and after rust removal and clear coat
Since we decided to save a few dollars by going with regular steel instead of stainless, the welds and tubes were quick to gather rust.

We expected this to be a problem, but after grinding down the rust and coating the whole thing in 1200 degree silicone clear coat, hopefully it won’t be too big of an issue down the road.




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