Barrel’s for the spring. 04-02-15

 

Okay its been a couple of days so here is what’s been going on.

We cleaned out the RV and on Tuesday we put it in storage.
Of course we forgot a lot of things and will have to go to the storage place in the next couple of days to get them; we have a list.

Spring Barrels

The barrel we used on the new water spring that we set up at the cabin last year collapsed during the winter. I think due to a bad venting system.

Yesterday I went to the salvage place and bought a couple of 55 gallon plastic barrels to replace the collapsed one and double the capacity.

The last time I bought barrels I got the white ones but this time they all smelled of vinegar. The blue ones had had soy sauce in them so I figured that it was easier to get rid of the soy taste than the vinegar taste.

One difference between the white barrels and the blue ones is; the bungs on the white ones are the same and are pre threaded for a 3/4 npt thread. On the blue ones; one of the bungs is threaded and the other isn’t.

This means that I would have to thread the bung myself. I thought I had a 1/2” pipe thread tap but I was mistaken. My largest pipe thread tap was only 3/8”.

What to do?

I got to looking around in my junk and came up with an old 1/2” pipe nipple that I had ground down for some other purpose. since I was working with plastic I thought that this would work as a tap so I clamped it in a vice.

 

Then I drilled a 3/4” hole through the center of the bung and then twisted the bung onto the pipe all the way down to the bottom of the threads.

The threads aren’t perfect but they are good enough for the input to the barrel.

The next thing to do was to to put a vent hole on the bottom of the barrel. The barrels will be lying down so the vent will end up at the top/back of the barrel.
After drilling a 3/4” hole in the barrel and used the pipe and a vice-grip to make 1/2’ pipe threads.

This should work just fine.

I have to buy a bunch of fittings and load a bunch of stuff in the van, then I will take it all up to the cabin in the next couple of days. This will be only a day trip.
I am going back to the cabin after Patti leaves to go to Oregon on the 8th of this month.
Patti will be gone until the end of the month and I will be at the cabin or most of the time.

I’ll talk to you in a couple days.