Saturday, March 13, 2010.

Another beautiful low humidity 75 degree Winter day! It was even warm enough to get some nice warm shower water from our Solar Water Heater. Between sessions of helping to prepare the garden, and sifting compost, I managed to sandblast and paint 4 more spiders, as well as the 54 brackets that hold the spiders to the 6 ten foot long "bars". The plan was to work on the pulleys, but it was too good of a day for painting to pass it up. This time I used the paint sprayer using the small "dash" pot, and sprayed the Rustoleum thinned slightly with mineral spirits. Really works well, but I plan to inspect all cracks/crevices and touch up with a good bristle brush before calling the painting finished. Here is a photo of the 54 tabs that hold the spiders. (You know what? THERE ARE 54 of many things to make in this project!)

March 19, 2010 The frame needed hours of sandblasting and wiping to get the black oily preservative removed from the new steel, and the rusty crud from the old boat trailer. Yesterday was another beautiful 73 degree day with low humidity which was perfect for spray painting the frame and trailer. It still needs another coat of paint, but today (and the next two days) are really windy, so no outside painting today. Here is the frame now.

The next photo shows the innards of a recycled automatic dishwasher which I hope to recycle into an oven. The angle parts are a bunch of signs a building contractor gave me when he stopped building houses. Hopefully, I can plug the holes in the dishwasher, remove the rubber and plastic parts, and build a frame around it using the angle iron from the signs. I’m thinking I may need to enlarge the hole to let the light in to the inside, and figure out a frame to use slices of glass. I just happen to have a roll of discarded fiberglass insulation that will work in the space between the outside sheet metal and the inner dishwasher frame. I especially like the functioning door!

March 22, 2010

Now that I have another can of white paint I put a second coat on the frame and trailer. This time I used a brush and got paint in all the corners and behind the bolts, etc. Using the brush takes about half as much paint as when using the sprayer. There are some brush marks, but the coverage is lots better. (Things around here turn to RUST in a big hurry.)

March 23, 2010

Using a tall step ladder, I mounted the mirrors on the two top rows of the frame, since the frame is still in the barn on the hard pavement. I discovered that not all my mirrors are ending up exactly 90 degrees to the bar they are mounted on. Some are good, and some are tilted a bit to the left. Not that it matters to the sunlight...but it would be nice if everything was in neat rows. Either I can make some custom tabs bent to 90 degrees, plus or minus a correction factor, or I can live with it. Maybe I’ll just mark the ones that tilt and put them all together on the bottom row, or on the outside edges. Well, at least there are fewer mirrors sitting all around in the house!
Here is what it looks like:

I need to get going on the oven platform construction. It looks as if the oven is supposed to move back and forth about one meter. So if the oven is a meter long, and it has to move a meter, then the track it moves on needs to be about two meters long. Wow!