I Aten't Dead

....but I have been away a while.

Life has been life, new changes, new opportunities, many new responsibilities.

I've had to let go of a bunch of stuff that wasn't working, to focus on the stuff that can work.  I've also culled a fair number of negative influences on my lifestyle.

Why am I back?

I've got a few interesting concept projects coming up, which bear documenting, and this always seemed an effective place to do it.  Post's will probably be infrequent, but we'll just see.

Onwards

Messing round in boats....

Since we got the little Bitish Seagull outboard going, and especially since it's got a couple of friends in the shed under restoration presently. I've been thinking about boat building again.

I've always wanted a boat, especially a small fishing boat, and a larger sail boat, but it's not been particularly feasible for various reasons.

I've been looking at various plans on the net, and this set from the FAO office of the UN is particularly good. They come with clear patterns and all but complete construction instructions.

They're designed for the displaced fisherman of the Bay of Bengal and as a result of the post WW2 mass dumpings of single cylinder engines (particularly the 102cc WD model British Seagulls), in South-East Asia and the consequent mass-retrieval by the savvy locals, they've been designed to run off a single cylinder outboard in the rating 3 1/2 - 8hp.

The heavy hog and stem allows for easy beaching in areas without jetty's, without tearing apart the hull.

The frame construction technique, means that if I want to change the boat to a cabin, all I have to do is glue and screw timber bulkheads up to a couple of frames and then enclose them.

The standardised building jig means all I have to do is cover it up and store it before building the next one, if I want to.
I haven't got the timber for building the boat in stock yet, but I'm pretty certain I can put together the jig out of what is floating around in the shed.

If anyone feels like buying me Xmas or birthday presents.... 19mm and 9mm marine plywood will do fine....

Home Pasteurisation Evolution

I've been playing with some equipment for work recently which has given me a few new ideas about the home pastuerisation rig.

Specifically;
- I cannot get anywhere near the efficiency I want out of the cooling unit using peltier plates. Instead I will do the following;

1. Use a tuckerbox freezer adjusted to run very very cold.

2. Supply power from the battery bank (still to be built). Use an inverter (probably out of a UPS, I have a 3kW unit in the shed now), for the 240VAC conversion.

3. Put a stainless beer keg in the freezer and fill it with methylated spirits (~90% ethanol, ~10% Methanol, so a melting point of -100 degrees or thereabouts). Plumb the keg to fill from the top, drain from the bottom (one fitting?).

4. Find a pump capable of dealing with the nasty nature of ethanol/rubber reactions, and the extreme cold.

- Control system.

1. Proface GP377 screens are very easily configured, can operate as a modbus master (a common industrial communications standard). So would be perfect for making this unit a standalone system. Should be able to get them fro under $200 each. Here's one on ebay.

2a. Control via a micro PLC. Either a Klockner Moeller PS141 or a Siemens S7-200, both of which I have on the shelf.

OR

2b. Control using some of these. This works really well because they can be addressed individually and the Proface can handle the transfer between them. There's a bit more work involved in this application, as I'd have to build a seperate TTL control supply (5VDC system) and interface it out using either solid state 5V relays or standard coil/contact relays.

The real benefit of this method is the analog control flexibility I gain from it. Analog points on PLC's a really (REALLY) expensive. By using a unit with heaps of analog channels and D/A channels as well as PWM Channels, I get heaps more opportunity to do decent control of the fluid.

- Hot water supply.
Either use a large solar collector, or a series of 24VDC heating elements on the battery bank. Both are fine, as electric-> heat conversion is spectacularly efficient.


Should start construction sometime.....

Workshop heater

So, it's getting cold already, and I'd managed to lay in the parts for my waste oil heater (as designed by Roger Sanders, over the last couple of years. So I recently began the project.

I took some shortcuts on Rogers design:

1. Instead of machining a burner from steel, I used an old 1" shaft aluminium pulley, and cut down the centre stock to make the entire shape of the pulley into a cone.

2. The centre shaft is the remainder of the drum shaft from the apple scratter. It's 1" and has a 3/4" thread on the bottom, which makes mounting much easier. To lock the burner up at the top, I simply did a hose clamp up underneath. One day I may change this out for a shaft collar.

3. The vessel for the heater is an old gas cylinder.

Which I cut the lifting ring off of.

and then cut holes for the shaft, air pipe, flue and door.

4. The feed pipe is scavenged copper tube.

5. And the control valve is a needle preceded by a gate valve.

I did a test burn, with the burner sitting in the anvil hardy hole.

Compared to Rogers burn, it looks completely right!

Next I fit the shaft and burner. Then positioned the air pipe and tack welded it.

With the shaft and burner out, I secured the air pipe, and drilled the hole for the feed to go through.

Then I used a piece of large scrap pipe to make the flue mount.

And took the whole lot outside for a real test burn.

The next weekend at home saw me fit off the flue and mount the whole lot inside the shed with a temporary tank for the oil.

Only one problem, no dektite was fitted, which meant that the whole shebang got filled with water when it rained....

And I didn't clean all the water out....

So I had a BLEVE in the shed...

Which I and the heater survived.

So all that is left to do is to dektite the flue, and move the old oil tank fromt he house, up to a decent height above the shed.

Functionally the unit is excellent. On a very chill night, it got the big space almost long sleeves warm, and it's definitely capable of making the shed a useful painting space in winter.

What I did on my holidays.....

So, on the easter weekend just passed, Andrew, Heath and I built an apple scratter (scratcher to some, codling grinder to fans of blackadder).

This is part of our long term plan to make better use of the long orchard, and any windfalls we can lay our hands on.

The results of our efforts look like this;

The whole item, note the cleats on the feed table, to keep the apples from moving down the chute too quickly, so we can sort out any rotten ones (then goes to the animals, definitely getting a pig next spring!). Also note the angled front-to-back braces, to add heaps of strength, but leave plenty of room for the buckets to be shoved under.



Under the feed table is the working box, where all the choppy stuff happens.




Inside the working box. You can see the nastiness in here. This is definitely one of those NO HANDS ALLOWED zones. Blood would taint the cider.

Currently the screws in the drum protude much too far. We'll drive these down so they are only just proud of the surface. The goal in doing this is make a finer cut, and therefore a more effective pulp for cidering.




The working box removed. This is to make cleaning that much more efficient.




We then started in on the cider press, but that's another post.

And then we went and got about 200kg of quinces, and the girl is in near permanent quince processing lockdown.

All in all the nicest easter I've had in 12 years. No rovers, no scouts, no waking up and having to put armour on. So good! Canty faire for a while now we thinks.

Home Pasteurisation Project

So, for a while now I've been planning to build my own pasteurisation rig.

There's a few ideas in the offing, which include;
- 12/24VDC control
- Running off the battery bank
- Using design principles from industrial pasteurisers
- Heat exchanger for the heating circuit for quick heating.
- Delay pipe for the kill time
- Chilled fluid vessel for the cooling ciruit for high speed cooling
- Divert valves for the switchover
- Chilled/heated fluids generated by peltier cooler, which require
- 160 A at 12 V
- 20KHz PWM Controllers and power electronics to suit
- Control via the Siemens S7 PLC I have sitting around.

There's a heap of plumbing required, but that's yet to be thought about in detail.
In the meantime, I'll build the peltier unit and it's controllers to generate the fluids.

Mythbustin!

Tassie has a terrible reputation for being intolerant of alternative lifestyles. In fact it was the last state to decriminalise homosexuality.

We've made some big changes but, in my opinion, none as big as this!

Cross Species Parenting!

It's OK, none of the goat kids are mine.....


But yesterday morning there was this:

This afternoon there was this:

And tonight there was this:

The nest has both chicken and duck eggs, and they're taking it in turns to warm them.

Things will be rather interesting when they hatch, methinks. Not looking forward to dragging chicken corpses out of the pond at all....