As crazy as it sounds, I’ve been having trouble finding stainless steel pipe around where I live.  The few places I contacted about getting it said they’d have to special order it and I’d have to purchase in 20′ lengths.  1 Stick is over $200 and for testing, I didn’t want to have to do this.

So, we set off for Lowes to see what we could find.  What I found were 1-1/2″ and 1-1/4″ Stainless Steel hand rails for handicap persons for the shower.  I purchased 1 of each that were 36″ long and proceeded to hack them up.  I cut them up in 5″ sections but aftwards wished I had cut the center pieces a half inch longer just to aid with assembly.  You’ll see what I’m talking about when I’m completely through putting it together.

So here is a shot of the outside tubes mounted in their sleeve.  I did this a little different from anything I’ve seen. I put the mounting plate at the top instead of bottom of the cell.  I did this to see if I can force the small bubbles that float around in the water to stay up on top of the cell instead of floating around and back into the cell itself.  I don’t know if this is going to work as I did not make it take up the entire top of the cell but rather just serve as a buffer of sorts.

 

Then the center tubes were cut and small holes approximately the same size of some stainless steel picture hanging wire (also purchased from home depot), was drilled into the ends in order to connect my anodes together.

 

So the idea is to connect the outside tubes via my small screws and then connect the inside tubes slightly extended beyond the ends of the cathode tubes using the holes.  We’ll see upon final assembly if this was a good idea or not.  I hope to finish it up this week and maybe start running some tests on it.

Here is a video clip of the tubes in their current state.

Oh, and one major note for those that are married!!!  Don’t let your wife know you bought brand new stainless handrails just so you could cut them up…   It doesn’t go over well… :-)

On a side note:  I wanted to post a few results I’ve calculated between plates and pipes…

 I wanted to take a few minutes to determine the usefulness of tubes versus plates. One of the finished projects I posted was from a fellow named Ron and he see’s much more activity than I do and the only real difference is that he uses tubes and I’m using plates.So in an attempt to explain this here is what I did.

Check my math!!!

1) The outside tube is 1″ and calculating for a 1/16″ wall thickness, the surface area of the inside 1″ tube should be:
2 * pi * .4687 * 6″ height = 17.64″ of surface area
2 * pi * .375 * 6″ height = 14.14″ of surface area

calculating anode * 6 pipes = 84.82″ total surface area
calculating cathode * 6 pipes = 105.84″

My plates surface area minus the holes that I’ve drilled and the square light switch hole are 12.48″ per plate. So using this you see that it takes a minimum of 9 plates to get the same surface area as the tubes.

Ron is using a straight 12v with no timing circuit and you can see his results here:
http://www.primeideas.info/forum/viewtopic.php?t=35

Ron also did not build his cell the same as Dave in that he used smaller diameter pipe which means that it would take even less plates to match Ron’s design, yet he still produces a lot more gas than I am with the plate design.

I have used up to 11 plates in my design and never got it where it was outputting enough gas to create bubbles within a 30 minute time frame. So given this information it appears the tube design performs better than flat plates given no other information.
A few more pictures…