Finally some progress to report. My neighbor welded a few more pieces on, like a horizontal to attach a drip shield to cover pumps. Then I did a bunch of grinding, blending, sanding, and painting. I still need to attach heating, the pumps, control panel, ... But with just one keg in the kegerator, I took to improvised brewing this weekend. This is just sitting in my garage at the moment.

A while back I found I wanted a place to sit things while brewing, so I added some wood shelves to my brewstand. I figured I would also attach my electronics to the shelves as well. That led me to think I would need shielding for those electronics, and I already knew I needed to add a splash guard to the pump area. Well, someone suggested I should just cover the entire top to prevent dripping and spills. At first I rejected the idea, but as the top of the stand got scratched and I thought about the size of the splash guards (made some prototypes out of cardboard), I came around to this. So I spent a few hours last night with the help of a neighbor plasma cutting stainless steel.



I still made a separate splash guard for the pumps. It is sitting on the floor in the photo.

The top cover is in two pieces because of the size of the piece of stainless I had. I might just attach both as is, and when screwed into place there shouldn't be any gap, or I might see if I can get the two pieces butt welded together. The large hole is for a burner under the BK. The small hole is where the electric heating element and cord comes out of the bottom of my HLT. My mash tun is a cooler, so no hole needed there. You can see some rust on the steel, which came from something else sitting on top of it a while back. I'll grind and polish that off when I clean up all the cut edges, and then repassivate.

I had the two pieces of stainless welded together. After that I removed some of the rust and ground out the weld. Yesterday I tapped screws to attach the shield to the stand. I used large screws and located them to mark where the structure is underneath, so a properly placed keggle is centered between four screws.

Since I'm still brewing in the garage and not in the basement with 240V, I attached a burner. Bought a Bayou Classic SP10 on Amazon a while back when they were on sale, cut off the legs, and then made a mounting bracket for the stand. I don't want this to be permanent, so three screws hold the bracket on. When I move to the basement, I can remove it. If I want to take the stand on the road, put it back on.





Bigger images in album here.