Make Stuff Log

Fixing and making things, what tools to get and what skills to learn, ...
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Sclass
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Re: Make Stuff Log

Post by Sclass »

That came out well. It’s actually pleasant to look at.

jacob
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Re: Make Stuff Log

Post by jacob »

ebast wrote:
Sat Feb 11, 2023 1:27 am
A wee stool (salvaged softwoods, hand tools only, no glues no screws, 31 hours).
Looks good! Are the angles in two directions or just one?

No glue? Maybe hammer some small wedges into the tenons on the top? Another good way to make sure mortise and tenon joints don't come apart again is draw-pinning, which you already do by design.

ebast
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Re: Make Stuff Log

Post by ebast »

Thanks--

@jacob-The angles are in one direction only (side to side) and not raking (back to front) as I thought: "it is surely a trivial step to project splay in two dimensions instead of one, but I will probably manage yet to screw it up in execution so maybe I will start with one dimension and see how I mess that up first."

You're right about wedging the tenons. I would've liked to however this got pressed into use when I was just testing out fit and I thought, well maybe I'll see how it stands up under use, see what starts to work its way out first and then properly wedge, pin, and/or glue it. Those double tenons end up being pretty grippy, though, like a bridle joint, so I'm curious if they'll stalwartly hold up just fine.

I have similar inclinations to wedge the front/back rail tenons as well, although that's a can of worms as I am curious to what degree the slant w.r.t. the legs (in particular on front and back the mortise is not square with the grain of the legs) could encourage splitting along the leading corners of the mortise... This, during the design phase I thought was a better accommodation than digging the mortises inline with the legs and thus requiring a (structurally vulnerable) angled notch on the rails where the rails overlap.. (note to self: easy solution--don't cross the rails!)

But see how much trouble a little splay visits upon the orthogonal world? I see now why so many of the random mass-produced chairs (chairs rarely having a right angle among them) I've ever accumulated use round joints, forgiving and robust as those are.

I never appreciate how little I understand about common everyday objects, or to be precise how many unknown unknowns become known unknowns, until I try--and even after--building one. It's like @sclass's old Palo Alto neighbor should have said: "What I can build, I do not understand."

AxelHeyst
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Re: Make Stuff Log

Post by AxelHeyst »

Well Pump Solarization
We've been using a gasoline generator to pump the well on our land for 25 years. I built a PV system for it. I've got a few more things to add to it, but it's up and running.

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(A few years ago a windstorm ripped the roof off. Also, the shed was facing west, so I jacked it up and rotated it to face south.)

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The default solution for well pump solarization is to pull the AC pump, replace it with a DC pump, drop that in the well, and install solar panels and a DC controller. When the sun shines, the pump pumps. No batteries, no inverter. That's the standard approach.

Well, there were a few things about the standard approach that bothered me. For one, it was expensive. Solar pumps are a few grand, paying for a driller to come pull the old pump, which is on 300' of galvanized steel pipe, is expensive, and a roll of 300' of polyethylene pipe is expensive.

Also, a lot of neighbors around here have had to replace their DC pumps after a few years, while they almost never replace AC pumps. The AC pumps seem to be more reliable than DC pumps.

The last thing I didn't like about replacing the AC pump was that.... that AC pump isn't broken. We send power down that hole, and it sends water back up, and it's been doing that for 25 years. When things aren't actually broken, I really prefer to just leave them alone.

So, I had a hunch that I could come up with an alternative design that didn't involve pulling and throwing away a perfectly good, reliable pump, and didn't involve spending so much money. This is what I came up with.

The major components are
  • six 120w used solar panels we got from a neighbor,
  • a 150v charge controller,
  • three 12v 100Ah AGM batteries, and
  • an AIMS modified sine wave, 5kw continuous 10kw surge 240v inverter.
This inverter is key to the system, and key to the low cost. It does one thing only: it takes 12v DC and makes 240v AC, single phase, NOT split phase, meaning, there's no neutral center tap, just two hots and a ground.

It's modified sine wave, which a lot of fancy household electronics don't like, so most inverters used for homes are pure sine wave. But pumps.... pumps aren't purists. They don't complain. Modified sine wave is fine with them. So this inverter is perfect for this application, and it's cheaper because it doesn't need to do anything other than generate that 240v AC. This inverter was about six hundred dollars.

More details and a video at https://tylerjdisney.com/blog/2023/2/4/ ... urwellpump if you're interested.

Gilberto de Piento
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Re: Make Stuff Log

Post by Gilberto de Piento »

That's awesome. :D

Edits:
- I'm surprised no one else here is excited about this project. Using a lot of reused parts to replace gas power with solar power to supply a necessity seems appealing.
- A possible advantage of continuing to use the ac pump motor is that I think you probably could still power it with a generator as a backup if you needed to. Assuming you have one that can produce 240v.

loutfard
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Re: Make Stuff Log

Post by loutfard »

I'm contemplating building a simple microwave vacuum food dryer. Supposedly close to freeze drying in terms of quality. Simpler physics should make this a lot cheaper and easier to build, with lower energy consumption. Timing wise, autumn and winter. Unless May and June turn out much productive than expected, that is.

The technical inspiration:
- How to make a microwave vacuum dryer with turntable. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... 7415002848
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_S1kK1BQefg
- http://stainlessstuff.net/dehydrator.html

Goals:
- make this a cheap, slow and cheerful build. reused and recycled parts where possible.
- work on this together with a trusted friend I want to learn from
- practice my embedded development skills. document this as open hardware to the extent possible.
- process more foraged, picked and waste app food. replace more shop buying.
- share the use with friends
- produce instead of buy healthy snacks, for own consumption and as gifts
- avoid buying a freezer
- experiment with cheap dried full meals, for travel
- environment. better align energy consumption with solar production.
- serendipity. Acquaintances run a strawberry farm. I wouldn't be surprised if they'd be _very_ interested in the added value this could bring. They're not the only ones. Who knows where that could lead...

AxelHeyst
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Re: Make Stuff Log

Post by AxelHeyst »

Gdp that's right. We've been using a generator for 25 years and so if the PV system goes down well just use the generator until the PV system is fixed. Also: the stock of water (in the tank) is several weeks. This system is hard to kill.

candide
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Re: Make Stuff Log

Post by candide »

Gilberto de Piento wrote:
Wed Feb 22, 2023 10:55 am
Edits:
- I'm surprised no one else here is excited about this project. Using a lot of reused parts to replace gas power with solar power to supply a necessity seems appealing.
Well, count me excited. I have been busy with the dreaded four-letter-w-word, so it got lost in the shuffle for me until now... That pump is one of the best solar punk things I have seen, and I hope there is no offense taken to me calling it "junk punk," which is a term I like to call some of my favorite stuff I tinker with.

I really appreciated Axel's explanation of how that inverter was the key hack.

mathiverse
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Re: Make Stuff Log

Post by mathiverse »

I think there was likely a lot of unposted excitement. I enjoyed the post and the video about the project. It is a great example of ERE in terms of using what you already have, using expertise to solve problems more efficiently than is possible in the consumer market, and DIY.

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Slevin
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Re: Make Stuff Log

Post by Slevin »

SIPs (Sub irrigated Planters):

Made these a month or so ago; just getting around to the posting bit. We have a glut of used wine barrels (read waste product) up here in wine country, and these things are great. Built to hold wine for long periods of time, not leak, and the after 5-7x uses of brewing wine in them they cost basically nothing (< $20). Thus, some ingenious guys have set up businesses buying them up, cutting them in half, and selling them back to the public as "half wine barrel planters" for $20 for their beer money.

Wine barrel capacity is about 60 gallons, so a half planter is about a 30 gallon planter, and with just a few more dollars in parts to make it a SIP (because who wants to water every day when you can water 2x / month), you can make a huge low maintainance planter. Mine are thrown right outside my back door and are gonna be used mostly for herbs / greens.

1: start with a half wine barrel, or any large and cheap container you can get your hands on
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2: Get literally any old trash to throw in the bottom of the barrel if you want (it essentially is just acting as a huge spacer here). If you are concerned with random plastic leaching, you can use some perforated drain pipe like I did here. You just want to make sure water can get in and drain out of this area, and whatever you are using is anaerobic. I've covered the ends of the drain pipe in old landscaping fabric I'm currently tearing up.
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3: Put some anaerobic stuff down here to fill the rest of the space. I used Perlite, which is good stuff because its also incredibly light, but even gravel or something could work if you don't care about weight issues.
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4: Drill a drainage hole near the top of this perlite filled area. You want some air to be in here to let the roots breathe, but also not too much for wicking purposes.
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5: Insert watering pipe, then put down a Soil barrier. Again just used old epl fabric I'm tearing up. Then throw down a bunch of soil on top.
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6: Plant your plants. Water them once deeply from the top, then just fill the reservoir periodically.
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AxelHeyst
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Re: Make Stuff Log

Post by AxelHeyst »

@slevin that is awesome thanks for the writeup.

So, remember how I mentioned that one of the cool things about my well PV system is that if it broke, we could just use the old generator?

Well, it broke.

To be more precise, a spider crawled in there and fried itself and a few juicy diodes in the process.

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We bought the inverter for about $600 new. I emailed the company about a repair and they were like "lol no" but they gave me a 15% off code, and they had a couple refurbished units in stock. So we got a replacement inverter for $305 all in. It just came and I'm going to drop it in this afternoon.

It turns out the turnaround time was so short that there was no need to get the generator over... the literal resource stock (water tank) is only slightly below half. Yields and flows and buffers! E

theanimal
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Re: Make Stuff Log

Post by theanimal »

I made a rocket stove out of 4 12 oz tomato cans and 1 #10 tomato can. I first cut a hole in the #10 can that would allow one of the smaller cans to fit through. Then I cut the same size hole in one of the smaller cans, removed the bottom on another and fashioned an elbow. I cut a third can in half and fit it in the top of the elbow so it sat about 1/2 in below the lid. Then cut a hole in the lid that would allow it to slide over the top of the chimney. With everything in place, I filled the empty space inside the #10 can with wood ash, placed the lid on and cut a few slots to create some tabs to hold the lid in place. The last can I cut into the shape of a T and put on the outside as a feed tray. Voila! I tested it by boiling 1.5 cups of water. It took 3 minutes 24 sec on the rocket stove and 3 minutes 4 seconds inside on our gas stove. Not bad.

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There was some nasty black smoke to start as whatever is the gold/copper colored interior coating on the cans burned off. :(

I'm going to make an adjustment to the horizontal can of the elbow tomorrow. I should've cut part of the side off on the inside so there is more room in the interior chamber. As it stands now the full can goes in through the side so the upper side overhangs the center of the chimney roughly halfway as seen in the 2nd picture.

Jim
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Re: Make Stuff Log

Post by Jim »

I'm not sure if this belongs here or in the fix it log. I cannibalized my existing fence in order to reconstruct a new one. The home my family and I moved into about a year ago had an decrepit old cedar fence that was probably 20 years old. The posts were falling over, the fence was leaning and the boards were rotting at both ends. I took the whole thing down, cut the rotten ends off all the lumber, craigslisted some PT 2x4s for horizontals and reincarnated my fence.

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Fence here is about a year old. In the back of the photo you can see a section of the older fence behind the maple tree and the kids play structure.

As a bonus, you can see some tandem trampoline frames my wife Craigslisted. We are using them as a trellis for some grapevine cuttings we got from a neighbor.

AxelHeyst
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Re: Make Stuff Log

Post by AxelHeyst »

I made a bivy bag:
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I followed this tutorial.

Cam
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Re: Make Stuff Log

Post by Cam »

theanimal wrote:
Sat May 06, 2023 10:41 pm
I made a rocket stove out of 4 12 oz tomato cans and 1 #10 tomato can. I first cut a hole in the #10 can that would allow one of the smaller cans to fit through. Then I cut the same size hole in one of the smaller cans, removed the bottom on another and fashioned an elbow. I cut a third can in half and fit it in the top of the elbow so it sat about 1/2 in below the lid. Then cut a hole in the lid that would allow it to slide over the top of the chimney. With everything in place, I filled the empty space inside the #10 can with wood ash, placed the lid on and cut a few slots to create some tabs to hold the lid in place. The last can I cut into the shape of a T and put on the outside as a feed tray. Voila! I tested it by boiling 1.5 cups of water. It took 3 minutes 24 sec on the rocket stove and 3 minutes 4 seconds inside on our gas stove. Not bad.

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There was some nasty black smoke to start as whatever is the gold/copper colored interior coating on the cans burned off. :(

I'm going to make an adjustment to the horizontal can of the elbow tomorrow. I should've cut part of the side off on the inside so there is more room in the interior chamber. As it stands now the full can goes in through the side so the upper side overhangs the center of the chimney roughly halfway as seen in the 2nd picture.
Great build! I'm curious how well it burned. During covid I built something very similar to what you did. Coffee can outside, soup can inside, sand and ash as insulator I think? I remember I lit it up and was disappointed about how it burned but not very enthusiastically. I posted on forums about it and got told to add one more soup can and one more coffee can to make the riser taller. And WOW did it ever burn then! I saw where the 'rocket' in rocket stove came from.

Does yours just burn normally or do you get that mild 'rocket' effect with it shooting out the top?

Jim
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Re: Make Stuff Log

Post by Jim »

Axeleyst, your solar project is great! I put a nearly identical system on an off grid yurt my wife and I used live in. Ours was wildly underpowered, but I learned a lot.
AxelHeyst wrote:
Sat May 06, 2023 4:09 pm
We bought the inverter for about $600 new. I emailed the company about a repair and they were like "lol no"
Do you still have the original inverter? If you can identify the fried diode and order one online, a few minutes with a soldering gun might fix it up. If it's too fried, you can maybe identify it from the breadboard on the new inverter if it's identical. It used to was a body could visit the local radio shack for this sort of thing.
AxelHeyst wrote:
Tue Feb 21, 2023 8:19 pm
Also, a lot of neighbors around here have had to replace their DC pumps after a few years, while they almost never replace AC pumps. The AC pumps seem to be more reliable than DC pumps.
Are they using brushed motors for this? I would have thought a brushless DC motor could be comparably reliable, but maybe the upfront costs is prohibitive.

AxelHeyst
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Re: Make Stuff Log

Post by AxelHeyst »

@jim The further explanation from the tech when he saw the picture of the five or six fried components was "those diodes are pretty important, no telling how much other stuff on the board got fried as a result of those failing." /shrug. If anyone wants a fried inverter to play with, I'm happy to ship it to you for shipping costs (or come pick it up in Sept :D ). I'm sure there are lots of fun components to salvage for those doing electronics DIY. It's not in my WoG at the moment so I'd rather pass it along.
.
wrt ac vs dc well pumps -- I'm not sure if the reliability issue is with the motors or the pump mechanisms on the DC pumps. I think the DC pumps typically use a special helical pump mechanism instead of the AC centrifugal pumps.

btw your fence build sounds cool but I'm not seeing the image.

Jim
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Re: Make Stuff Log

Post by Jim »

They might be positive displacement pumps instead of centrifugal, so the motor speed isn't really an issue. We use this class of pump in the fire service for purging air. Maybe that's a good application in a system that doesn't get steady amperage, like a pv system. Ditto DC motors.

I'll to fix the fence image.

theanimal
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Re: Make Stuff Log

Post by theanimal »

Cam wrote:
Sat May 13, 2023 1:49 pm
Great build! I'm curious how well it burned. During covid I built something very similar to what you did. Coffee can outside, soup can inside, sand and ash as insulator I think? I remember I lit it up and was disappointed about how it burned but not very enthusiastically. I posted on forums about it and got told to add one more soup can and one more coffee can to make the riser taller. And WOW did it ever burn then! I saw where the 'rocket' in rocket stove came from.

Does yours just burn normally or do you get that mild 'rocket' effect with it shooting out the top?
Thanks! It seems to burn well, it's just a matter of getting the chimney warm to get it going. I don't really know what I should be measuring it against, so I just used my gas stove as comparison. Not sure if it should be burning better than that or not. It shoots out the top once the stack gets hot enough and starts drawing air in. I definitely don't think I could boil water with a fire in a regular can, whereas with this setup I can easily so maybe that is a sign that it works.

My understanding (maybe wrong) of rocket stoves is that they are dubbed so because of the sound of the strong air intake, similar to a rocket. Mine definitely does not have that strong whooshing sound, but it does burn hot, so I don't know. There's a book on rocket stoves I read a little while ago that talked about the fundamentals necessary to get it to work correctly. If I remember right, the riser has to be something like twice the length of the horizontal portion to allow for the right air flow. That would explain why yours worked much better with the stack of 2 cans.

Cam
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Re: Make Stuff Log

Post by Cam »

theanimal wrote:
Sun May 14, 2023 7:07 pm
Thanks! It seems to burn well, it's just a matter of getting the chimney warm to get it going. I don't really know what I should be measuring it against, so I just used my gas stove as comparison. Not sure if it should be burning better than that or not. It shoots out the top once the stack gets hot enough and starts drawing air in. I definitely don't think I could boil water with a fire in a regular can, whereas with this setup I can easily so maybe that is a sign that it works.

My understanding (maybe wrong) of rocket stoves is that they are dubbed so because of the sound of the strong air intake, similar to a rocket. Mine definitely does not have that strong whooshing sound, but it does burn hot, so I don't know. There's a book on rocket stoves I read a little while ago that talked about the fundamentals necessary to get it to work correctly. If I remember right, the riser has to be something like twice the length of the horizontal portion to allow for the right air flow. That would explain why yours worked much better with the stack of 2 cans.
Very neat. Shooting out the top is my definition of success, especially with the at-home-made-out-of-old-soup-can creations :D

I really gotta read a book on those things.

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