One last push and this pot will be complete. The last items are prepping the pot for installing the sight glass and adding the two valves. Luckily, these tasks are far easier than soldering plugs in the holes.
The sight glass required one 7/8" hole near the bottom of the pot and a 1/4" hole near the top.
As with the first pot I worked on an eye bolt was mounted near the top of the pot and a piece of 1/2" steel rod was used to align the bottom fitting.
Soldering both the eye bolt and sight glass 90 degree fitting went smoothly.
Next up was the two fittings for the ball valves. Soldering fittings like these is actually pretty easy since they are big and have a ton of mass. You can simply leave the torch on the fitting while touching solder around the joint between the fitting and the pot until it flows nicely.
And with that, the soldering is done for this pot!
I don’t love the rectangular hole and will try to think of a solution for making it look less ugly but for the time being it is sealed and will do its job.
I have a ton of cleaning to do as this pot is covered in flux residue. After that is complete, I will begin reassembling the whole system and move on to calibration.
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Short post here. Ill save you from pictures of all the work I have done over the last few days because it is boring but I did a deep scrub of all of my pots and my fermenter with a stainless steel scrubby and a baking soda/TSP mixture.
The next step was to passivate the stainless to give it its protective oxide layer. I used a 4% citric acid solution heated to 160 degrees to do this. The solution was applied to all surfaces and left for about 15 minutes after which they were all rinsed with water.
All of the equipment is now left out to air dry.
We are getting so close to being done with this rebuild. The remaining two tasks are:
- Assemble everything
- Calibration
The assembly should be pretty quick because I soldered most of the stuff. This step is really just installing the two heating elements and bolting everything back together.
Calibration is going to take a long time and will require a few brew sessions to complete. Because I have changed the function of my pots, a lot of the characteristics I had established with my system are now different. Things like how fast the water can heat up in the exchange coil or how much water evaporates when boiling are all things that I have to now measure again.
The markings on both of the sight glasses now need to be redone as well as the internal configurations of the pots are different.
There is still a lot of work to be done but we are past the metal work and cleaning and are now onto the more fun stuff!
looking great! cant wait to drink the beer 
Hope to make that happen soon. The rig is so close to being done.
