Not the novel. Not the mini-series, either. Steven King had absolutely nothing to do with this stand. It's made of aluminum Unistrut looking stuff, holds hundreds of pounds of scalding hot liquid up off of the ground in preparation for my winning the Darwin Award (if I'm going to kill myself, it might as well be interesting).
Planning began prior to buying the aluminum, so I knew I needed around 70 feet of ... well ... something. I started haunting scrap yards and stumbled upon the aluminum channel which eventually became my stand. I bought it as scrap for a dollar per pound from Non-Ferrous Extrusion and Scrap Metals, Inc. (8410 Hempstead Road, Houston, Texas 77008, 713.869.9551), where they actually make the stuff by pressing solid aluminum cylinders up against a form, forcing aluminum out the other end like Play-Doh through a pasta maker. It's quite impressive.
The bottom-most level of the stand holds the kettle 30 inches above the floor. I chose this height because I wanted to be sure of getting adequate flow from the kettle, through a chiller and into a carboy. A friend of mine constructed the lower level of his two-tiered brewery at around 24 inches and we're always moving his scaldingly hot kettle to a higher place after the boil is finished. I didn't want to experience this problem, and since I'm 6'-5" tall, I figured I could cope with the added height. YMMV! The second and third tiers (on my stand) are each 21 inches above the next lower tier. With everything in its place the total height from the floor to the top of the hot liquor tank is just under eight feet.
The whole thing is held together with copious 5/16" x 3/4" bolts and appropriately sized nuts with lockwashers. It's rigid as can be. I have a ShopSmith Mark V which I set up in drill-press mode. By using the fence and miter gauge as stops, I just stuck the ends of the precut channel in and drilled a hole. This saved hours of measuring and marking the locations of all those holes.
You might notice that the top tier is a separate piece bolted in place. This is only because there weren't enough pieces of channel long enough to build it as an integral part of the rest. Of course, if I ever switch over to a two-tiered design, this quirk of fate will make it very easy to do. (But that is not in the planbooks.)