Strewth, Its been 4 months since I updated this thread. A lot has been happening in my neck of the woods. I had a bit of a hiccup back in November as I was invited out to celebrate Melbourne Cup day (the horse race that stops Australia). I never follow it, but in this instance, I partied a bit too hard and fell over and broke my wrist so progress was delayed.
The following is not really shed related but ight explain why I have been so quiet on the forum.
When I broke my wrist, I was part way through a major electrical upgrade on my caravan which installed a wind up battery tray right underneath the van itself to carry two batteries,
Not shown, but I used a $35 boat winch to winch it up and down to service the batteries
And then there was the 1500 W inverter tucked in under a seat.
and a couple of power points.. one for the microwave
and one for the toaster and Nespresso Machine!
Who said you can't have a good coffee in the middle of the bush?
Well, with this stuff, I needed to add some solar power (you may have noticed the remote controller for the solar charger beside the first power point).
Fitting up the Tracer 30 amp regulator was easy as the van was already prewired for solar at the factory.
You can see the blue cat 6 network cable running off to the remote console seen earlier. A couple of dual pole circuit breakers on both the panel and the charging circuit.
Once my wrist came good, I decided to get into the solar panels. This was pretty tricky because the van is a pop top and has no load bearing structure in the roof. Based on another mate who had done the same thing, I made up a roofrack from 40x40x3mm angle iron to carry the panels
which required some brackets I machined up and drilled and tapped threads
Including a couple of practice holes that ended up in the wrong position.
I had talked Chris down the road into making a press brake for his hydraulic press after reading one of Tin's threads and this was his first real job on it. The roof surround leaned out 5 degrees and the brackets needed a bit of a tweak to get things square.
Whilst on the solar bandwagon, my son in law wanted to charge some motor bike batteries so I got him to order one more 10 W panel and a 3 amp regulator which cost about $35 all up and I gt him a roll of 12 volt cable in return.
And I whacked the panel on the garden shed roof (HINT: not my workshop shed)
I bought a small gel cell battery and designed up a battery tray for it. I bought a spray can of repositionable glue and printed out the plan ful size on A3 size paper (roughly 11"x17" for non metric speakers). this made it so easy as I just cut it out and folded along the dotted lines before peeling off the pattern!
And added a 0.2 amp light
and now I have the brightest off-grid garden shed in Australia!
Wel back onto the real shed. You will be pleased to now that we finally got the 10mm electrical cable off the drum it had been sitting on for the last 6 months and pulled trough from the meter box on on corner of the house on Sunday.
and ran it through the ceiling to the diagonally opposite corner
and across the patio and through a 26mm hole in the slab
Into a trench beside the existing lightweight shed cabling
and out a new hole in the shed floor
and up to a sub board full of circuit breakers
Now I have 15 amp power points everywhere!
There are actually about the same number of circuits in the shed as in the house now!
In amongt this all, I finally got around to ordering my Ditron DRO for the lathe and have started to fit it up while I have the lathe up on its mobile wheels for the first time ever!
Must weigh about 400 kg now full of tools
I made a start on the DRO installation. first the easy bit
I have not got much to show for today's effort but have got this far with the cross slide scale after a lot of head scratching.
The scale needs to extend beyond the rear of the cross slide a bit so I decided to make a mounting strip that is cut out to allow access to the gib screws. I decided not to attempt to drill and tap this mount late this afternoon as in my experience, that is a recipe for disaster so I left it for another day. It should be pretty easy from here.
Oh almost forgot, finally got a linisher belt too. These are awesome bits of Gear.
And have been practicing how to use a Weber Q which will replace our BBQ in the van.. Awesome gear!
Anyway, sorry I have deviated off topic a bit, stay tuned, I will update as the DRO proceeds. It is pretty much the last thing on my shed wish list.