My Ghetto Stirplate

Alright, so when you make a yeast starter you can do what I've done in the past and just let it sit in a dark place with tin foil on the top...
OR
You can put your starter on a stirplate to give the yeast plenty of oxygen and really, really take off doing what they do best.

Stirplates cost a lot of money and I'm a pretty thrifty guy, and I like to build stuff so I decided to make my own. Thanks so much to Push Eject for putting these plans on his website. I did improvise a little, but not much.

I basically took an old hard drive enclosure and gutted it, raided the rare earth magnets from the hard drive, took an old PC fan and an old cell phone charger and put it all together. Here's some of the process.

The parts:
An old hard drive enclosure.
A PC Fan.
A rare earth magnet.
A Rheostat from Radio Shack.
An old cell phone charger.


The guts:
I took out the hard drive, circuit board and all the wires from inside the enclosure.
I harvested the wires from inside the enclosure to make the connections from the power supply to the rheostat to the fan.
At first I tried mounting the HDD to a couple of pieces of wood, but the magnet was too far away from the magnetic stirbar to take hold so I went to Lowes and got a couple of bolts and nuts to mount it to the top.

The finished product:
Even with the fan mounted to the top of the enclosure I still wasn't getting a strong hold from the magnet to the stirbar because the plastic was so thick. A cutting tip on a Dremell rotary tool made quick work of the plastic.



Bingo! This baby will keep the yeast in suspension and growing nicely!


What's next? The Kegorator will get started next month along with The Son of a Mother of a 38DD Fermentation Chiller.