The Origin Of Our Stills (as written by Robert Warren for the Charles 803 still) This still design is the result of a series of workshops, which took place in Sacramento, California in 1979 and 1980, during the period of the infamous Arab Oil Embargo. Gasoline had risen in price from $0.65 /gallon to $1.20 /gallon in the space of about eight months! A small group of alcohol fuel enthusiasts met weekly over a period of several months, and eventually we decided to incorporate as a non-profit educational group, which we called the California Alcohol Fuel Producer's Association (CAPFA). I had built my first still a few months earlier, and had demonstrated it publicly at the Earth Day Festival on the University of California, Davis campus. That still was powered entirely by the sun and a tiny stream of pressurized city water, which created a vacuum so that I could boil water at 129 degrees F (54 C). I had scavenged an injector that was beyond factory tolerances for reliable use, but was perfectly adequate for my intended use. I only produced slightly less than a pint of alcohol per day, but considering the fact that my batch of five gallons of 5% beer (which I had made from a sack of worm-infested brown rice) only contained perhaps a quart of pure alcohol ( 0.05 x 5 gal = 0.25 gal ), I was pretty happy, since it had cost absolutely nothing to make it. The main problem was that I didn't have a way to control the temperature, so my final product was only 120 proof (60% alcohol). The second problem was that I found out I was losing just about half of the precious alcohol vapors which were being sucked (injected) into the waste water stream through the venturi nozzle. However, as a result of my willingness to experiment with a new (to me) technology out in public, a number of people signed up on my list to get involved with promoting alcohol as an alternative to gasoline. Although my vacuum still was nothing like the "Charles 803", it nevertheless provided a focal point for bringing together a group of people who all wanted to learn how we could make our own fuel. It was at UC Davis that I first met Mike Mandeville, who had earlier that year published a small book on how to make a solar still (his design was also fairly simple, but effective, though it only yielded small amounts of ethanol). So, from this phone list we gathered a few people who became actively involved in our small group. Making the still was only the first step, as beyond this, we wanted to establish an entirely new industry which provided alcohol at the gas pumps instead of gasoline. There were a dozen people in our group which started meeting every Wednesday night for a few months, and every week we would gain one or two people, one of whom was Pete Charles. Pete was an electrical inspector for the City of Sacramento, and at this point he had already been experimenting in his backyard, fermenting some beer mash and trying to distill it. There have been lots of stills built over the years, and the dynamics of ethanol distillation are well known and widely employed. However, within the beverage industry, a much lower proof alcohol is the end product. The other extreme is within commercial ethanol production for the chemical industry, where the stills are very high tech and much larger, and fairly expensive to replicate. Pete Charles was working with a typical old-style design where the distillation column is attached to the top of the cooker, so the steam can readily rise up inside the distillation column. The problem, he noted, was that once the mash starts to boil, it takes a lot of fiddling, trying to adjust the flame higher or lower, to get just the right amount of steam volume rising up into the reflux column. There is always a time lag between your adjustments and the desired effects. Plus, you have to apply just the right amount of cooling action to that steam, so that the alcohol proof can be regulated. His first innovation was to cool the steam directly, by putting the cooling coils on the inside of the column, rather than having the alcohol go through the inside of a coil with water on the outside. This was a big improvement, but there were still problems. For one thing, attaching the distillation column to the top of the cooker barrel made the whole thing sit up pretty high, almost beyond reach, plus the heat from the boiler made it difficult to get close to it. So on his next run, he removed the column from the cooker, capped off the bottom and soldered a threaded pipe fitting near the bottom, where he then attached a radiator hose, with the other end going up to a fitting at the top of the 55-gallon drum he used as a cooker barrel. This hose routed the steam from the top of the cooker into the bottom of the still. He needed to support the distillation column, so he attached it to the corner post of his carport with some plumbers' tape, and fired up his next batch of mash. This was an instant success, and he was able to get a much higher proof than before, about 140 to 150 proof. He had used this first batch to run his lawnmower. He explained all of this to our group, and so a couple of us went out to his house to see what he was doing. Encouraged by his progress, we scrapped the idea of my earlier vacuum still, and decided to make one like Pete Charles had made. One of our members, Hollis Osborne, a high school shop teacher, volunteered the use of the high school welding shop. I spent a day going to scrap metal salvage yards, buying various sized pieces of brass and copper pipe, and brought all of this stuff to the first meeting at the welding shop. We had 12 people, all with different backgrounds, and we pooled our efforts in building that first still. We only took a couple of evening sessions to complete it. The next weekend, we met at someone's house, and tried to run a small batch. We only got 100 proof on our first run, and we lost an awful lot of alcohol vapor as uncontrolled steam, but we weren't at all disappointed. It did work - it just wasn't very well regulated, in terms of temperature. Les Wescamp, a retired industrial engineer, said he could fix that problem. He came up with an automatic temperature control valve used in the refrigeration industry (which we now sell separatly), and at our next shop session, we added two special fittings: one for the temperature probe, and another to hold a temperature gauge. Now, we really had something! The temperature gauge was this beautiful old brass mercury-type gauge from a railroad engine, which complimented the brass pipe we had made the still out of. That weekend, we had another still cook-off experiment, and our hydrometer showed 190 proof on the first run. We were ecstatic! Mike Mandeville pointed out that since the stuff was still hot, the hydrometer reading would have to be compensated for temperature. We didn't have a compensation chart, so we waited and let it cool down. It turned out to be 165 proof! Not too shabby, we thought. In the meantime, Les and another of the group, Jody Kirsan, were busy working on converting Les's 55 Chevy pickup truck to run on alcohol. The first thing they did was to rebuild the carburetor. They substituted a larger main jet , and changed the paper and cork gasket materials to a kind of rubber material. (More about this later). Plus, they extended the fuel line by attaching it to a piece of copper tubing which made two wraps around the exhaust manifold, so it would get pre-heated a bit. We drained the gas tank, put in a new fuel filter, and poured in our first batch: a little less than two gallons. The truck started up almost right away! We had done it! The total cost of converting the truck (since we didn't count our time) was just under $15.00! Well, we reported our success to the rest of the Wednesday night group, and since we still had additional pipe from my first scavenger run, we broke up into three groups of four, and we built three more stills in the next two weeks. The ones made out of brass pipe had to be brazed, which was a slow and expensive process, while the ones we made from copper were easily soldered. During this process, we came up with a couple more design improvements, and we experimented a bit with variations on the basic design. The number of people in the class kept growing, while others dropped out, but there were a whole bunch of folks all wanting their own still. We even had a couple of old farmers driving from a hundred miles away to come to the Wednesday night shop class. I was still working at this time for the city water district, so I had access to wholesale prices at one of the local pipe supply houses. I bought some 20-foot lengths of 3"copper pipe and all the fittings we needed, and I found an industrial source for the automatic valves we needed. So we gathered materials to make 12 new stills, as we now had around twenty people in the group. This time, however, we didn't just dive in and make the same still as the first one. We now had a total of five stills, including the first one that Pete had made. We compared them, as each was a little different. We critiqued them as to how they seemed to work. Many of us had started fermenting our own private batches of mash at this point, and we wanted to see what worked best. Les Wescamp, with his background in food process engineering, studied the literature on commercial distillation technologies pretty thoroughly. He then calculated the optimal size and length as a function of column diameter, as well as adding the concept of the bubbler (or doubler, as it is also called in the distillation industry, as it doubles the alcohol steam volume by quickly removing half of the water vapor - more on this, later). So, armed with the calculations Les had done, we arrived at our final design, which was actually the fourth generation still, having gone through three earlier models. Pete Charles documented this by drawing up the enclosed blueprints, which we submitted to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF), in order to get an experimental fuel distiller's permit. The BATF had a section in the permit application which asked for the design model / manufacturer of the still, so Pete labeled it the Charles 803 and labeled the blueprint as such. The year was 1980 and this was his third design, hence the number, 803. We started publishing a newsletter, and charged $35.00 for membership. Within one year, we had over 900 members, and during this time, we participated in various public and televised events where we demonstrated running our legal still (getting the BATF permit was no problem), and pouring the fuel into Les's pickup truck, or into an army-surplus generator, or even a motorcycle. The last two didn't even require any real engine conversion other than adjusting the needle valves a little. Over a two-year period, 290 stills were built in these classes under my direction. Many of these were used productively, although I know that a small number of them were made expressly for making bootleg white lightning, because they silver soldered them instead of using lead solder. Quite a few of us converted cars, trucks, and tractors to ethanol. I have owned four different vehicles which I have run on alcohol, including two old Volvos and a Ford truck. The Volvos and the pickup all had manual chokes, so I never converted anything: I would just pull out the choke a bit when I decided to run a batch of ethanol through the engine and clean out the carbon (which it does wonderfully). These old vehicles were built before the days of fuel injection, a subject which I confess I know little about. Later I would switch back to running on gas, so I usually had to change the fuel filter afterwards - the ethanol would always pick up some rust from the fuel tank. On vehicles we had given the total ethanol conversion process, including increasing the compression ratio, 160 proof seemed to work just fine, and gave us about the same mileage as gasoline! By running my cars with the choke pulled out, I ran a pretty rich mix, so my mileage was only perhaps 80% of what the car would do on gas. Also, I tried to stick with running only 180 proof, since I didn't have any fuel pre-heater or anything. Well, this was all about 20 years ago, and looking back, it all seemed to fall apart as soon as the gas prices started coming down again. For a period, gas rose as high as $1.45/gal, and after awhile, when it dropped back to $1.15, people seemed to just accept this as the normal price, forgetting that just a couple of years before they were paying only half that much. Pete Charles dropped by the office one day to give me the original blueprint of the still plans. He told me, "I never want to see these plans again. Hang on to them, though, and put them to good use. I just can't handle the daily deluge of questions I get about this anymore." I had at that point, put in two years of mostly unpaid hard work promoting alcohol fuel, and now it seemed like everyone was jumping ship. When we cleaned out the CAPFA office, I held on to whatever documents I thought needed to be saved. I have carried them around with me for almost 20 years, and was about to throw most of it out because I plan on moving to Europe soon, and then I got an email from Keith Addison at Journey to Forever. So I packed up a box and sent it over to Journey to Forever in Hong Kong, along with the last still I made a few years back, and now the whole cycle can start up again. This still, then, is a fine tool, which evolved through many designs, and is rated (theoretically) at 7.5 gallons per hour of 180 proof alcohol. I have never seen it produce more than five gallons an hour, though, but then, maybe I just didn't have a big enough boiler. © 2000 Robert E. Warren |
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