in a guest location today I went over the JD's nice clean garage because I got tired of filming in my dirty garage and today we're going to talk about how to install the sight glass kits and a lot of people have emailed me some questions about how to put this in and also I just added an eyebolt for the top to hold the top of the sight glass to the to the top of your vessel and I also added some calibration numbers if you probably saw on the website I've got some vinyl cut all-weather vinyl cut for marking off the increments on your vessel on the sight glass now this is the the combo thermometer and sight glass which I'm currently out of stock right now but the procedure for installing this and calibrating it is exactly the same whether you use the the combo thermo sight or the regular elbow sight glass so we're going to talk about how to install this in keg based vessel today but the installation is just about the same even if you had a straight sided pot all right the first thing you need to do is mark the location of your drilled hole and I don't recommend putting it anywhere where there's a handle so when a keg you want to avoid the the handle hole in the top skirt and in a regular straight sided pot you want to avoid the handle that sticks out because you don't want your glass to impede handle in any way so rotate your your pot off to the side someplace where there is no handle and we want to focus on the the bottom of the pot you want to take a piece of masking tape and put it about at the bottom sort of even with the with the bottom skirt weld here and just secure that there and you want to measure from the very top of the weld about 5/8 of an inch all right so use a sharpie marker or pencil or something like that and from the very top of that skirt well their Markoff 5/8 of an inch above that alright that's your center point for the hole we're going to drill and the drill bit that I recommend you use is a uni bit or a step drill bit and you know these are very helpful when you're trying to bore out a hole that you already drilled and it also makes very quick work through thin metals like stainless steel pots and kettles they do go in increments and the bit right here that you see me holding here is also available on my website where you buy the sight glasses I had a couple requests to link people to places that they can buy these inexpensively so I figured you know why not just make it easier and offer this it's it's less than ten dollars for this bit and you can drill tons of holes to install a bunch of sight glasses you know cutting oil in your garage you can actually use olive oil or vegetable oil whatever you have to dip this bit into and keep the bit cool while you're drilling and stainless when you're drilling stainless it's preferred that you use a slow speed but use you know moderate pressure push down on the bit pretty hard well as you're drilling it alright and stop at 9/16 and you're going to see that the hole is nice and clean and if you want to you can go from inside the keg if your drill is small enough and use the bit to deburr the backside of the hole so through the magic of editing we have our nice clean 9/16 hole and to double check you want to take your your threaded bushing just make sure that it fits nicely so to install the Sai class again whether it's the tea or the elbow type fitting just take note that we have a couple different parts one is the the threaded bushing which is a quarter-inch of NPT we have either one or two stainless washers and we have the silicone gasket so the way that this goes together is that you put the bushing through the washer first and you reach inside the kettle and stick it through the hole so that the threads are sticking out then you want to apply the gasket and you can just hold that still while you thread in the bushing okay so you can see that the the the gasket is pretty tight on the threads so it'll even holds it in place and now you take your your elbow fitting or your tee and you put it there next to the threads and then you just turn the threaded bushing from inside the vessel okay and you just hand tighten that until it stops and then take note as to how much the gasket is being crushed you don't want to squeeze it out of there but you do want it to compress just a little bit so if you need to use an adjustable wrench on the inside you should do that the next thing we want to do once it's installed is you want to take a level and start leveling off your pot and you want to level it from front to back where the sight glass is installed and that looks pretty good and then also side to side and if it's not level you know just grab a couple pieces of shim or scrap wood and shim the pot until you get a perfect level front and back inside the side this isn't especially important when you start calibrating the into the galley levels on the sight glass the next thing you want to do is get ready for your installing the eye bolt at the top to hold this steady so that it's not moved too much and just quickly if you want it if you want to make it look good you put the level against there make sure that it's plumb in relationship to the all right and then put the the eye bolt down the sight glass and find it if it's on if it's a keg you want to find someplace on the skirt that's above this weld because if you make it lower than this you could leak through that hole and the same thing with a regular straight sided pot you want to make it as close to the top as possible and again you find where that that hole needs to be and put a mark on the kettle with a sharpie and then you want to drill a nice clean quarter-inch hole I had already drilled this hole earlier but you leave one nut on the eye bolt threaded almost all the way down slip it over the sight glass insert the bolt into the hole and then from the backside put another nut on there okay so you can see that now we have a nice vertical sight glass installation the eye bolt up here is holding it steady and and it should be leak free at this point so the next step is to calibrate and again make sure that your vessel is generally level before you start the calibration process what you're going to need for your calibration is a some masking tape a pencil sharpie marker whichever you prefer and a couple of containers that have at least a gallon increment marked off on it and the vessel that we're using today is just a PT plastic jug here and I've measured with a more accurate measuring cup the half gallon mark and the 1 gallon mark up here so we're going to fill these up to the 1 gallon mark with water and then we're going to calibrate the vessel you want to take a piece of masking tape and go along the side here and try to make it as vertical as possible you could just kind of eyeball it okay that looks nice and vertical and then just push it on there now this serves two functions this is what we're going to write on as we're adding our gallon at a time water so we can mark our one two three four five and all the way up but it also creates a nice vertical straight edge so that when we're applying our vinyl numbers they don't shift all over the place so we're using this as a straight edge and a frame of reference so I want to take your container with a gallon of water in there and just dump it in carefully without spilling it on the floor all right we have one gallon so put a tick mark on your paper take another gallon all right so we have two gallons in there and there's still not anything showing up on the sight glass so we want to tick marks you're going to keep adding gallons until you see the FIR the first time it shows up on the sight glass and then instead of putting tick marks on your paper you're going to put tick marks on the tape that's stuck to the side of the sight glass what we're going to do is mark every gallon increment and then we're going to just sort of estimate where the half gallon mark is if that's something you care about but on a 15 gallon vessel one gallon increments is probably good enough of course we sped up the film just a little bit so but two people working on with two containers really we did this in probably seven minutes or something like that but as you're filling it you want to let it stop sloshing around a little bit and then put your tick mark there and one gallon at a time is the best way to do this we didn't feel the need to do it in half gallon increments again because you can kind of just look at it and you know 9/16 between each line is about half gallon so you can sort of estimate it by eye the next thing to do is drain this whole thing so they could take the sight glass out the sight glass out of the the keg the kettle and we're putting it on our workbench now and probably the easiest thing to do is to grab some tape and secure the sight glass down to the table now our tape is the straight edge it's going to be the left hand straight edge for all the numbers so I want to make sure that that's on the left-hand side and that most of the sight glass is exposed upwards so I'm just going to tape this down so that doesn't move on me while I'm trying to work and basically it's close enough now my kids now are available with either black numbers or white numbers and I apologize for anybody who who ordered the kit before I gave you the option but now there's black and white and you could also buy these individually and I'll put them in an envelope and ship in first class if you bought a sight glass for me earlier before I introduced the vinyl numbering all right but what you want to do JD wants black numbers for his side glass so we're going to go with the black and what you want to do is cut each one of these numbers out and these numbers a backing like a sticker and then the top layer is actually an application mask it's sort of like masking tape and but it doesn't have the same amount of adhesion it's a very mild tackiness so what you do is peel off the backing and what you'll find is that the vinyl sticks to the application mask again it's pretty it's pretty gentle but it's just enough to hold that let out that number from getting wrinkled so here's our first mark it's a three three gallon more and if you've cut this line nice and so use that as your straight edge against the the tape I didn't cut this one exactly perfectly but we're going to do the best we can so you line up that edge and then you roll the number across the tube normally if this is a big piece of vinyl you'd use a plastic squeegee to make sure that it was nice and smooth but I'm just going to do it with my fingertip and fingernail all right and once you have that rubbed on now you grab the corner of the application tape and peel it back all right so it looks pretty good it's nice and straight and the application mask is the key to putting on this this vinyl nice and straight again you can't really move this around very much at all if you need to take this off for any reason you're going to scrape this off with a with your fingernail and throw it in the garbage so try not to screw it up and we're just going to repeat that for all of the the numbers all the way up to 15 so this is all whether it should take some pretty good beating and relatively permanent I mean you can scratch it off and if you need to clean up the the adhesive after removing them you could probably use a little bit of googan or some wd-40 on a paper towel or something like that but it's you know one of the nicest calibration methods that I've seen and you know I hope hope you like it I wanted to thank JD for letting me use his Sai class as a guinea pig and in his garage for the cleanliness factor of it all and we're going to install this back on the kettle and hopefully it's going to help him out on this next brew day all right guys take care you