emnpaul wrote:Dude that sux. Dogs balls.
Maybe email them a pic and see if they'll help you out.
Email Crown, or the retailer (Craftbrewer)? It's a nice thought, but either way I don't know what they'd do to help. They might get a laugh out of it though.
To make me feel better (or perhaps to put the scale of my problem into perspective) a couple of mates came out with some stories when they saw the damage. One who used to work for Independent Distilleries in NZ told me about a time he finished steam cleaning a multi-kilolitre tank, closed it up, and it imploded to the point of bending in half. An expensive mistake but it didn't cost him his job. The other story was about a friend of my housemate who worked at a hydroelectric dam, also in NZ. I guess they needed to empty the pipeline for maintenance, so they closed the intakes and then dumped the water out of the outlets. At some point in this process a valve should have been opened at the top of the pipe to admit atmosphere, which this poor bloke forgot to do. The entire assembly at the top of the shaft imploded and was written off. You'd think they'd have a fail-safe to stop that from happening, but apparently not. Predictably, the guy was fired.
Anyway, I took a rubber mallet to the urn and got it more or less cylindrical again. Some of the big dents popped out quite easily, but as you can see in the first pic, it creased itself up quite severely around the back, which I freaked out over a bit as this is where the weld seam is. I've heated a bit more water in it for cleaning purposes but am yet to boil a batch. I reckon it'll be OK though. Might have to upgrade my kettle and demote the urn to HLT duties. If it's going to fail (split), I know that H2O at 70c+ is bad, but boiling wort is worse. I'm in the process of designing a HERMS, so it's a good time.