I made the outer box that would house the heat elements of the distiller. Originally I had planned on making a smaller box that would be snug on the heating coil and adding more working outwards for insulation and covering. However, since I didn't have the actual heating element yet I made the outer box and will be working inwards. Below is a photo of the box.

We used the fablight machine which is basically a laser cutter for sheet metal. It's awesome. To use it you create a CAD file of what you want in 'sheet metal' mode. Then you export the DFX and open it with the fablight software, convert it to a .fab file and upload to the fablight cutter. It's really a spectacular device and I'm amazed that it was made in house.

Below is a photo of the original cutout of the sheet metal


cut out sheet metal





After cutting out the metal I went to the steel bender. There were some complicatons because of tabs that my CAD had automatically put in the design. Having never worked with sheet metal before though, I didn't know any better and figured the CAD program knew what it was doing. The tabs go in the way of bending a little so I had to remove some of the teeth from the bender. Also, sheet metal bending is an imprecise art. Because steel, and other metals are springy, you have to overbend a little, and I kind of had to just eyeball what I thought was right. It turned out fine though. Below is a photo of bending in progress.


bending the sheet metal

After the bending was welding. I started out with MIG welding- I had the clamps in place to create perfect right angles, did my practice welds, everything. The video below explains more

After burning several holes through my box, even when I pressed the button for 1 second, I decided MIG is not the answer for my box in that moment. Sara very kindly offered to fill in my holes but Sam had metioned I could just cut some extra pieces of thin metal and spot weld the box together and I decided that was a safer route. Below is a photo in the process of covering up the holes and one of the final product

hole repair final product

More to come on this box because now that the heating element is in I have to add tabs to the box to support it and I also have to add a cover to the top and an insulative layer on the bottom and sides so you can touch it while the distiller is in use.