Reports From the Manufactory

Smol!

That said, I still wish you’d do the whole cabinet slide layer cake for extra panels :stuck_out_tongue:

So the brake handle on my mill just broke off. Ok then… is there an MTBF number for that anywhere I wonder?

I figured to keep working for a while just grabbing the brake handle with a crescent wrench till I got around to fixing it. Yeah that idea lasted a whole 5 parts…

Just a set-screw and a pin to drive out to release the cam. I don’t really want to fight getting that M4 thread out of that hole so I’ve opted to just drill it out and re-tap 5/16-24. So I grabbed a chunk of 5/16 SS rod and threaded both ends. Then I grabbed a ferro-rod handle I screwed up some time ago, chopped it down and worked that into a decent looking knob.

…and now we see why I can never throw scrapped metal parts away.

I decided I wanted the handle a little longer for ease of reach and ease of finding it by feel when you’re looking at the part not the switch. That was a bit too long though, so I cut it down a bit more.

and still I felt it was missing something. Oh hey I know!

there we go. Shorter handle and a bit of a bend to make it easier to reach from below. Once the loctite sets that should be better than original. If you gotta fix something might as well improve the design while you’re at it amirite?

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Kinda random, but I was driving through some “back road” areas of the bay area and saw one property where they had one or two solar trailers down by their well and tanks, where the house was really far away. It’s already fairly well known that sometimes infrastructure cost (trenching, putting in power cables for thousands and thousands of feet) can be more expensive than “going off grid”. Might be an interesting “niche market” to advertise in if you plan on businessifying the solar trailer.

I’ve known some machine shops that did that. On huge diesel generators anyway. Their story was they were the first or near enough of a company in a new industrial park that the power company seemed to want them to pay the price of running power to/through the whole park. So they told the power company to stuff it and bought generators that live on their own semi-trailer; run the whole factory off that.

The advantage of a semi-fixed install like that is the solar trailer could be the battery/charger/inverter, but more solar panels could be put on a roof or ground-mount and run to an aux DC input. So it’s still much more power than just the trailer panels when it’s home.

Or just build the thing as a whole fixed install, like Syonyk’s office. I wonder if that idea would pair well with the fancy tiny-home trend. The kind of folks already of a mindset of efficient living and arn’t expecting ‘all the watts, all the appliances, running all the time’ levels of power off 200-400 amp grid service.

I recently revisited that back road pump with solar. See picture

I only just realized that the location is far enough away from civilization that a grid outage could easily last weeks, so yeah, solar powered water makes sense

Have you ever looked at your 2-pairs of 2"x2"x1/8" steel box tube sawhorses and thought, these just arn’t big and/or strong enough?

Well I have, and now I’ve fixed that!

Step one, dig through the steel pile

Step two, run away crying from the wasps pull out 3 ~7’ lengths of 12" I-beam and start carving it up with the 9" angle grinder. Then weld those into legs.

Repeat 4 times.

These arn’t completely absurdly heavy yet, so it’s back to the steel pile to dig out the 8"x8"x1/2" angle iron. I’m excited for these, as a top-rail not only are they super stiff, they’re also providing a generously large surface to clamp all kinds of project too.

Now these are heavy enough I can only pick up one end at a time. And darn it if they don’t slide around like bars of soap trying to move them.

Then start clamping and welding the tops on. Getting some good practice in with .035 flux-core wire with these too.

Turns out flipping these back up is… not feasible by one person. Or 2, as it would later turn out. So here comes the tractor and chains again.

Ok, all complete and right-side up for now. Big surprise: They’ve very stable :smiley:

With that big ‘ski’ on the bottom they’re not hard to scoot around one end at a time like this. Which is great so I can line things up as needed for more delicate fit-ups. Also I plan on welding some D-rings inside each leg for easier moving with a chain. Just grabbing it by the center results in a tendency to twist while suspended. Worse, there’s a high risk of the chain sliding off center while moving them too.

Aside from that they’re all done. I expect to be tacking fixturing and hooking up ground clamps directly to the sawhorses frequently, so I won’t be putting any material into painting/coating them.

Now to start the layout for the big thing to be build on top of them…

You’ve got forks for your tractor - could you just weld some box tubes under the top angle so you can slide the forks through them?