Building a stookah

 When I renovated my kitchen in 2010, I got new pots and pans.  The Circulon Infinite Hard Anodized Nonstick Cookware was supposed to be good stuff.  The pots and pans could go through the dishwasher.  It was a few hundred bucks.  During the Covid year, the handle popped off of one of the pot lids. 

The company was no help.  The school building had just been renovated, but the metal shop wasn’t operational yet.  At the end of that school year, retiring was a really good idea, so I did that.  The lid never got repaired.

Surprisingly, I found the lid and enough copper fittings to jig up a steam port.

No idea why I have that brass nut or bushing or whatever it is.  It is the same size as that copper fitting, but drilling a 1 inch hole in stainless steel isn’t for the timid.  Most hole saws are for wood or soft aluminum.

The biggest metal cutting drill bit I have is a half-inch.  I have a series of forstner bits up to 1 1/4 inches, but those are for wood.  My expedient approach was to use the half-inch bit and move the drill around at an angle to hog out a 5/8″ hole.  Then use the forstner bit to hog out to 3/4″, and so on.  Since drill bit flutes were doing the cutting, instead of the cutting tip, it didn’t seem like the bits would be ruined.

With the lid hole, the next step was to fabricate the vent. 

With the copper all prepped, soldering isn’t hard if the joints don’t have to be water-tight.

I was wrenching on that brass nut pretty hard.  It’s possible to shear the fitting off,  so it was getting scary.  The copper fitting isn’t threaded uniformly, like a bolt.  It gets tighter, as the brass nut goes on farther.  That’s what makes a tight seal.  I didn’t want to force the nut on any farther than this.

I need to come up with a spacer to take up that gap.  I could go to the hardware store at the end of the street, but Uncle Junk is not made of money.  I do have a piece of HDPE that used to be a cutting board, and two hole saws.

And, it came out okay.

Altogether, it looks like this.