Build-it-Yourself Moonshine Still Plans

Pint O Shine's 6 and 12 Gallon Pot Still Designs

Pint O Shine is behind the design and templates used to fabricate these 6 and 12 gallon pot stills. It's a classic design that has been around for many decades, if not a century or more.

6 and 12 Gallon Pot Still Plans

Using the proper gauge copper in your pot still requires a bit of knowledge about the thickness, alloy, or quality of copper to use for a large pot still, in this case, it is .032 (20 gauge). Additionally, a good pair of copper shears will insure good clean cuts for soldering.

With this 6 gallon pot still specs pdf from an excel spreadsheet, you can upscale all the major dimensions in increments of 0.1x up to 3x based on the 6 gal template. It calculates overall height, maximum diameter, the volumes of the three main body parts and the total volume. This gives you calculations in liters, US Gal, UK Gal and sheng. Figures are shown in both inches and metric. It shows you what the overall size will be so that you can pick a suitable scaling factor to apply to the 6 gal template when adjusting to the size of still you prefer to fabricate.

Pint O Shine Pot Still Plans

Note: no responsibility to the use or accuracy of these documents are assumed. They are intended for educational purposes only. These documents may be used freely and circulated freely but may not be sold for profit, or included in any other book or website for profit.

Design Considerations When designing the 6 gallon copper pot still, effort was made to fit the whole thing on a single half sheet of copper 3'x4'. Fabrication techniques found in the book: More Mountain Spirits by Joseph Earl Dabney can be helpful in the construction process. The plans are based on a Kentucky Still design. The shape needed to construct the still is called a frustum. A frustum is a right cone in which the top has been cut off parallel to the base of the cone.

The 12 gallon still was made to fit as large as possible on a 36 x56 sheet, but the Flake stand does not fit. A diagram of how to make a 5 gallon flake stand on an extra 17 x36 sheet has been included in the documentation. The flake stand can be made out of thinner stock.

Calculation made to total 5.99 gallons to the bottom of the collar. Note that the 12 gallon, is simply the 6 gallon still scaled up by 1.26x within the CAD program. The 12 gallon still parts had to be repositioned to make them fit on the 36x56 sheet. The circles cut from these templates have a ½ extension to hammer down the lip around the circle to create a pan. The end of the document contains a 32 page template that can be printed, assembled and used for a pattern to cut around like a dressmakers pattern. When printing the pattern, make sure to set Adobe Acrobat to print actual size. The scale of the grid is in inches.

When assembling the pattern, cut off the top margin of the page to the solid line and the left margin to the solid line and taper the pages starting top left and going to bottom right. The easiest way is to assemble one page at a time to the template. All parts are marked with the page number and the edges are marked with the adjoining pages.

Additional Resource Information Pint-O-Shine has put together include videos which show step by step processes using the paper template diagrams, alog with working the sheet copper. These videos are on youtube at:

These patterns can be used with any size sheet/still by transferring the pattern to the metal with a Pantograph. In our modern age of computers the "SCALE" command in cad will do the same thing.

For instance. In another project to fit 4 one gallon stills in the space of a single 6 gallon, Cad made that possible knowing the relationship of linear scaling to volume changes on a cube. So to get a 1 gallon from a 6 gallon all you have to do is scale everything by the cubed root of 1/6. or .55 and walla! a new pattern. Intellicad is a good drawing system to layout sheet metal. Here is a link to download the student free Intellicad version.

6 Gallon Pot Still Design, - right click to download pdf

12 Gallon Pot Still Design, - right click to download pdf

God Speed in turning your pdf downloads into working stills