The Welded Stand
Introduction
For the stand, I used a basic Brutus 10 design. However, I didn’t follow Lonnie’s design other than the general shape. After quite a bit of thought about different options, I elected to make the following changes.
1) Mild steel in lieu of stainless steel. Using stainless has its obvious advantages, the two biggest being that it will not rust and that it just looks good when finished. Not much beats that nice clean metallic look. However, using stainless has, for me, more disadvantages than advantages. The welder that I have will not work with stainless. Stainless is much harder to drill and tap than mild steel. Mild steel is cheaper. I don’t employ the use of a gas beam. Overall, for the weekend hobbyist wanting to use the tools at home and not laying out money for stuff to work with stainless, it just made sense to go with the mild steel.
2) No gas beam. Black iron plumbing was, for me, easier to work with. While not a big concern at all, and probably not really anything I should have been worried about, is that the mild steel could over time corrode internally and cause flakes or debris to get into the gas valves or orifices and cause issues. Truthfully, the chances of this happening are at the far far end of extremely rare, but still something I thought about.
3) Two burners vs three burners. After doing some online reading and consulting with the folks at my local HBS, I chose to do a HERMS system instead of direct firing the mash tun.
4) I put burner grills on the thing. A lot of folks expressed concerns and issues with sitting the pots directly on the stand. This has a tendency to transfer a lot of heat into the structure. While not significant enough to cause structural issues, it is enough to cause burns to the brewer or possibly damage silicone tubing. I welded up three grills and mounted them to the top using ceramic tile as a thermal barrier.
5) This runs on low pressure LP and not high pressure LP. This is necessitated by the use of Honeywell valves. The regulators in the valves will blow out if you run high pressure LP. Take a look at the section on gas hookup for more information on the gas setup.
6) I built a custom control box for the rig. None of the controls from the original Brutus 10 design were used.
Now that I have the main differences laid out, I will get into some of the specifics. First things first, you need to decide how big you want this thing to be. My main areas of consideration were:
1) Brewing capacity
2) Storage space
3) Stability
Let’s look at brewing capacity. If you want to make 5 gallon batches, you are probably using 10 gallon pots. If you already have the pots, you can just measure them. If you don’t, I wish you good luck on your quest to find diameters of pots you are considering buying, both with the handles included and without. There are so many different manufacturers of pots, and they all have different dimensions, and there is no one good repository of size data anywhere. I will just say this – you are going to have this stand for a while. If you start out making 5 gallon batches, and down the road decide to move up to 10 gallon or larger, you aren’t going to want to scrap this stand and build another. Taking that into consideration, I built basing on a 10 gallon batch size, though as of now I am only brewing 5 gallon batches. You can always put smaller pots on larger burner grills. You can’t always safely put a larger pot on something made for the smaller ones.
Secondly is storage space. Sure, you could build a stand that is 8 feet wide and 2 feet deep, but you might have to give up a parking spot in your garage for it. You would be sure you could fit a 1 bbl set up on it, but you are losing space in your home to keep the monster. So, this really comes down to design optimization. Make sure you have what you need, but try not to overbuild.
Lastly, stability. At 8.3 lbs/gallon, water gets heavy. Add the weight of the pots, fittings, and grain and you easily are exceeding 100 lbs on the stand for a 5 gallon batch. Over 100 lbs of 150+ degree hot stuff that you don’t want tipping over. With all that weight up at the top, you have to consider the stand tipping over, or a pot tipping off of the stand. Again, once your know your pot diameter, you can make the stand deep enough to keep the pot stable. My stand is 16 inches deep, with a 12 inch gap between the front and back cross beams. For me this worked out to be stable and mitigate any worries I had of the thing tipping over or pots falling off.
Drawing and materials
Now with those three things out of the way, here is the drawing of my stand. Its 66” wide, 16” deep, and 28” tall. The bottom cross beams are 8” up from the bottom of the legs. You will notice that the cross beams on top run the full width of the stand. On the original Brutus design, the legs run the full height. Since the weight goes on top of the beams, it made more sense to me to have the cross beams sit on the legs, rather than attach to the sides of them.
I called around to different metal suppliers in the area and got quotes for 2”x2”x1/8” (11 gauge) mild steel square steel tube. Prices ranged from ~$2.25-$3.00 a foot (2014 dollars). Here you have two options. They can either deliver it to you for a fee, or you can go pick it up from them. Be mindful that the stock typically comes in 24 foot lengths. This will not be safe in a pickup. They may be kind and cut it down to 12 foot lengths for you. If not, you will need to find a way to cut it to get it home.
Prep work
Cutting the steel was easy. I picked up a cut off wheel from Home Depot or Lowes that went right on my miter saw. MAKE SURE YOU TAKE THE SAWDUST BAG OFF THE SAW. I have some nice burns on mine after neglecting to remove it. Also, do your cutting outside. Its going to throw a ton of sparks and metal dust everywhere.
Very important – measure from one end, cut. Measure your next cut and then cut. And so on and so forth. Do not measure all of the cuts from one end first then go thru and cut them all. You may find at the end that you have pieces of different lengths. The cut off wheel is about 1/8” thick, so depending on where you hit on your line, you can have a piece 1/4” long, or a piece 1/4” short. Best practices are to measure and cut, then measure and cut, doing your best to hit the mark the same way every time. This will give you the most consistent lengths.
After cutting, you will have to clean up the burrs on the cut ends. Using an angle grinder, just hit it enough to knock the burrs off. Try to keep from removing any material. It doesn’t have to be perfect – just a clean surface for welding.
Once you have all your parts cut, it’s time to lay them out and get them ready for welding. There are many different types of welders and welding methods available out there. If you don’t know how to weld, this might be a fun project to learn on with the guidance of a friend who knows how to weld and can teach you. You can pick up a low cost welder to do some minor non-structural work with, go to Home Depot or Lowes and Lincoln Electric makes wire feed flux core setups for under $300. They will only weld mild steel up to about 1/8” thick (lucky us, that’s what we’re using), and will not work on stainless. If welding is intimidating, or you just aren’t sure or don’t know how to weld, my ONLY advice to you is to hire someone to do it. It is very easy to not get the right penetration you need to properly join the metal, but it looks right, and will collapse under weight. Break out the yellow pages – it shouldn’t be too expensive (probably cheaper than buying a welder).
If you are going to tackle it yourself, I broke it down into three parts. The front, the back, and the 12” intercostals. The front and back each consist of 2 legs, a top cross beam, a bottom cross beam, and a 16” support that runs centered from the top beam to the bottom beam. Make sure the connection you are working on is clamped up tight before you tack it. Tack weld everything first. If you mess it up, grind it apart and do it again. If you have it all level and clamped up tight it should be no issue at all to get together. On the top, I made sure that the intercostals were flush with the top. This will help later in ensuring that your burner grill and pots sit flush.
Build out
I did the front first, then the back, then put the intercostals in and clamped the front to the back and got them all together. After welding it all up, I ground the welds flush. When all said and done, you have 8 openings into the structure. 4 on top (the ends of the top cross beams) and 4 on the bottom (the bottom of the legs). To close these out, I went to Home Depot and bought a piece of 2”x36”1/8” steel. This was cut into 2” lengths. For the close out of the top cross beams, I just welded them on.
For the bottom of the legs, I wanted casters attached to move the thing around. I picked out 2 with brakes and 2 without. They have threaded stems, and I picked up matching zinc plated flange nuts and then matching zinc plated hex nuts for them. Each caster needs one flange nut and one hex nut. I would put the size here but it most likely varies depending on caster manufacturer. I know for a fact that the two with brakes and two without had different size stems.
In the 2”x2” metal squares previous cut, I drilled a hole in the center that was just one size over the size of the threaded stem on the caster. Over this hole, I put the flange nut and welded it on. Then after making sure that the caster freely threaded into the welded on nut, I welded this plate onto the bottom of the leg with the nut on the outside. I had considered putting it on the inside, but structurally it’s better if the flange nut is pressing up on the steel as opposed to the steel pulling down on the weld holding on the nut.
After going thru and making sure all the welds were ground down to whatever your liking is, its time to paint. Since mild steel was used, it will rust if it doesn’t have surface protection on it. I used high temp grill paint. There are several colors available, silver, white, black, chrome, etc. Make sure that you tape over the opening in the nuts on the legs prior to paint. Otherwise, cover the whole thing in a few coats.
Once its dry, you can put the casters on it. First thread on the hex nut all the way to the base of the threaded stem of the caster. Next, thread the caster all the way into the flange nut on the leg. Now level it out by threading the casters out of the legs. Once it’s all level, tighten the hex nut up against the flange nut to lock the caster stem in place, and you are done with the stand.
For the stand, I used a basic Brutus 10 design. However, I didn’t follow Lonnie’s design other than the general shape. After quite a bit of thought about different options, I elected to make the following changes.
1) Mild steel in lieu of stainless steel. Using stainless has its obvious advantages, the two biggest being that it will not rust and that it just looks good when finished. Not much beats that nice clean metallic look. However, using stainless has, for me, more disadvantages than advantages. The welder that I have will not work with stainless. Stainless is much harder to drill and tap than mild steel. Mild steel is cheaper. I don’t employ the use of a gas beam. Overall, for the weekend hobbyist wanting to use the tools at home and not laying out money for stuff to work with stainless, it just made sense to go with the mild steel.
2) No gas beam. Black iron plumbing was, for me, easier to work with. While not a big concern at all, and probably not really anything I should have been worried about, is that the mild steel could over time corrode internally and cause flakes or debris to get into the gas valves or orifices and cause issues. Truthfully, the chances of this happening are at the far far end of extremely rare, but still something I thought about.
3) Two burners vs three burners. After doing some online reading and consulting with the folks at my local HBS, I chose to do a HERMS system instead of direct firing the mash tun.
4) I put burner grills on the thing. A lot of folks expressed concerns and issues with sitting the pots directly on the stand. This has a tendency to transfer a lot of heat into the structure. While not significant enough to cause structural issues, it is enough to cause burns to the brewer or possibly damage silicone tubing. I welded up three grills and mounted them to the top using ceramic tile as a thermal barrier.
5) This runs on low pressure LP and not high pressure LP. This is necessitated by the use of Honeywell valves. The regulators in the valves will blow out if you run high pressure LP. Take a look at the section on gas hookup for more information on the gas setup.
6) I built a custom control box for the rig. None of the controls from the original Brutus 10 design were used.
Now that I have the main differences laid out, I will get into some of the specifics. First things first, you need to decide how big you want this thing to be. My main areas of consideration were:
1) Brewing capacity
2) Storage space
3) Stability
Let’s look at brewing capacity. If you want to make 5 gallon batches, you are probably using 10 gallon pots. If you already have the pots, you can just measure them. If you don’t, I wish you good luck on your quest to find diameters of pots you are considering buying, both with the handles included and without. There are so many different manufacturers of pots, and they all have different dimensions, and there is no one good repository of size data anywhere. I will just say this – you are going to have this stand for a while. If you start out making 5 gallon batches, and down the road decide to move up to 10 gallon or larger, you aren’t going to want to scrap this stand and build another. Taking that into consideration, I built basing on a 10 gallon batch size, though as of now I am only brewing 5 gallon batches. You can always put smaller pots on larger burner grills. You can’t always safely put a larger pot on something made for the smaller ones.
Secondly is storage space. Sure, you could build a stand that is 8 feet wide and 2 feet deep, but you might have to give up a parking spot in your garage for it. You would be sure you could fit a 1 bbl set up on it, but you are losing space in your home to keep the monster. So, this really comes down to design optimization. Make sure you have what you need, but try not to overbuild.
Lastly, stability. At 8.3 lbs/gallon, water gets heavy. Add the weight of the pots, fittings, and grain and you easily are exceeding 100 lbs on the stand for a 5 gallon batch. Over 100 lbs of 150+ degree hot stuff that you don’t want tipping over. With all that weight up at the top, you have to consider the stand tipping over, or a pot tipping off of the stand. Again, once your know your pot diameter, you can make the stand deep enough to keep the pot stable. My stand is 16 inches deep, with a 12 inch gap between the front and back cross beams. For me this worked out to be stable and mitigate any worries I had of the thing tipping over or pots falling off.
Drawing and materials
Now with those three things out of the way, here is the drawing of my stand. Its 66” wide, 16” deep, and 28” tall. The bottom cross beams are 8” up from the bottom of the legs. You will notice that the cross beams on top run the full width of the stand. On the original Brutus design, the legs run the full height. Since the weight goes on top of the beams, it made more sense to me to have the cross beams sit on the legs, rather than attach to the sides of them.
I called around to different metal suppliers in the area and got quotes for 2”x2”x1/8” (11 gauge) mild steel square steel tube. Prices ranged from ~$2.25-$3.00 a foot (2014 dollars). Here you have two options. They can either deliver it to you for a fee, or you can go pick it up from them. Be mindful that the stock typically comes in 24 foot lengths. This will not be safe in a pickup. They may be kind and cut it down to 12 foot lengths for you. If not, you will need to find a way to cut it to get it home.
Prep work
Cutting the steel was easy. I picked up a cut off wheel from Home Depot or Lowes that went right on my miter saw. MAKE SURE YOU TAKE THE SAWDUST BAG OFF THE SAW. I have some nice burns on mine after neglecting to remove it. Also, do your cutting outside. Its going to throw a ton of sparks and metal dust everywhere.
Very important – measure from one end, cut. Measure your next cut and then cut. And so on and so forth. Do not measure all of the cuts from one end first then go thru and cut them all. You may find at the end that you have pieces of different lengths. The cut off wheel is about 1/8” thick, so depending on where you hit on your line, you can have a piece 1/4” long, or a piece 1/4” short. Best practices are to measure and cut, then measure and cut, doing your best to hit the mark the same way every time. This will give you the most consistent lengths.
After cutting, you will have to clean up the burrs on the cut ends. Using an angle grinder, just hit it enough to knock the burrs off. Try to keep from removing any material. It doesn’t have to be perfect – just a clean surface for welding.
Once you have all your parts cut, it’s time to lay them out and get them ready for welding. There are many different types of welders and welding methods available out there. If you don’t know how to weld, this might be a fun project to learn on with the guidance of a friend who knows how to weld and can teach you. You can pick up a low cost welder to do some minor non-structural work with, go to Home Depot or Lowes and Lincoln Electric makes wire feed flux core setups for under $300. They will only weld mild steel up to about 1/8” thick (lucky us, that’s what we’re using), and will not work on stainless. If welding is intimidating, or you just aren’t sure or don’t know how to weld, my ONLY advice to you is to hire someone to do it. It is very easy to not get the right penetration you need to properly join the metal, but it looks right, and will collapse under weight. Break out the yellow pages – it shouldn’t be too expensive (probably cheaper than buying a welder).
If you are going to tackle it yourself, I broke it down into three parts. The front, the back, and the 12” intercostals. The front and back each consist of 2 legs, a top cross beam, a bottom cross beam, and a 16” support that runs centered from the top beam to the bottom beam. Make sure the connection you are working on is clamped up tight before you tack it. Tack weld everything first. If you mess it up, grind it apart and do it again. If you have it all level and clamped up tight it should be no issue at all to get together. On the top, I made sure that the intercostals were flush with the top. This will help later in ensuring that your burner grill and pots sit flush.
Build out
I did the front first, then the back, then put the intercostals in and clamped the front to the back and got them all together. After welding it all up, I ground the welds flush. When all said and done, you have 8 openings into the structure. 4 on top (the ends of the top cross beams) and 4 on the bottom (the bottom of the legs). To close these out, I went to Home Depot and bought a piece of 2”x36”1/8” steel. This was cut into 2” lengths. For the close out of the top cross beams, I just welded them on.
For the bottom of the legs, I wanted casters attached to move the thing around. I picked out 2 with brakes and 2 without. They have threaded stems, and I picked up matching zinc plated flange nuts and then matching zinc plated hex nuts for them. Each caster needs one flange nut and one hex nut. I would put the size here but it most likely varies depending on caster manufacturer. I know for a fact that the two with brakes and two without had different size stems.
In the 2”x2” metal squares previous cut, I drilled a hole in the center that was just one size over the size of the threaded stem on the caster. Over this hole, I put the flange nut and welded it on. Then after making sure that the caster freely threaded into the welded on nut, I welded this plate onto the bottom of the leg with the nut on the outside. I had considered putting it on the inside, but structurally it’s better if the flange nut is pressing up on the steel as opposed to the steel pulling down on the weld holding on the nut.
After going thru and making sure all the welds were ground down to whatever your liking is, its time to paint. Since mild steel was used, it will rust if it doesn’t have surface protection on it. I used high temp grill paint. There are several colors available, silver, white, black, chrome, etc. Make sure that you tape over the opening in the nuts on the legs prior to paint. Otherwise, cover the whole thing in a few coats.
Once its dry, you can put the casters on it. First thread on the hex nut all the way to the base of the threaded stem of the caster. Next, thread the caster all the way into the flange nut on the leg. Now level it out by threading the casters out of the legs. Once it’s all level, tighten the hex nut up against the flange nut to lock the caster stem in place, and you are done with the stand.
All the square steel tube cut and ready to be welded.
Most of the welds done, prior to grinding them flush. MIG welding throws spatter everywhere, so I first ground the high stuff using a grinding wheel, then used one of the flapper wheels with sandpaper to finish everything out smooth.
Ignoring my garage's state of disorganization, here is another view of the stand almost completed.
Here it is with the 2"x2" squares welded on to close out the holes at the ends of the cross beams, and you can see how the metal looks painted. You will notice that the hole closeouts are on the ends of my stand unlike on the top in the original design. The blue tape was protecting the bearings on the casters as I did some paint touch up after installing them.