Progress on my brewery has slowed, but only due to a couple of grams of brass.
As mentioned in my previous update, inside the tank connector which will link my siphon pipe to the tap on the mash tun, there’s a small collar (or band, for fans of punning titles) of brass. Probably only half a millimeter or so all the way around, but enough to stop the copper pipe going all the way through.
Consulting the mighty internet, it seems I wasn’t the only person to come up against this snag, and by far the most common fix was ‘file it’.
I’ve got a small set of metal files so got to work on it, but it turns out that they will barely touch brass. After half an hour of furious rubbing (steady!) I’d barely taken anything off. Balls.
Lucky for me my brother has a nice powerful dremel with a grinding bit! A bit of grinding, swearing, hammering, WD40, and a bit more grinding – success! I now have a tank connector which a 15mm copper pipe will go through nicely.
Next is to just create the hole for it in the mash tun, cut the pipe to length, and then use my compression fittings to make it all watertight. More updates as and when that happens!