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Thanks for the kind words, guys. What AC-DC and 3d0g refer to is that we've known each other for years on multiple hobbyist distillation forums. Starting with the old Yahoo Distiller and New Distiller forums (where I may still be a moderator) grown out of New Zealand home-distilling legalization, international hobby distilling forums have been a huge factor in developing and disseminating the theoretical and applied information that all of us now take for granted. Shortly after the turn of the century, there was so much awful, dangerous, and superstitious distillation misinformation running rampant, that it was seriously difficult to get good facts about our science/art. The situation was so bad that I wrote "Making Fine Spirits" (Amphora Society) just to give the beginner some trusted facts and procedures he could build on. While I can't prove it, I'm betting that most of the artisan distillers here started with information, first-, second-, or third-hand, that we hammered the BS out of in the hobby forums. Truth be known, I'm kinda proud of all of our efforts.

That is amazing how many barrels you can fit in that small space. I watched for about 1 minute and saw 6 roll in and they hardly took up any room

Hi Rachael, as Foreshot mentioned above, the pallet stackers are perfect solutions for those of us who don't have room to operate a fork lift. We build our own 3 level barrel racks and use the pallet stacker to load/unload from the top two rows. Here's a link to an Instagram video we recently posted that shows a barrel being offloaded onto our racks. These are 15 gallon barrels.

I used mostly .093 copper plate on my build. The steam kettle itself was stainless, but the dome walls, column and top condenser where all rolled copper pieces tig welded together. The spun dome top was .125 thick. It took a very large slip-roller to roll the .093 plate into a 4' long x 11" diameter tube that became the main column. Using .125 plate would have been better but was not really practical for the machinery I had access to at the time. If I recall I purchased "half hard" plate as well. I am currently considering building a 300 gallon still myself and will probably try to go with .125 plate.