2 of 4 solar panels installed

I've successfully installed the 2nd solar panel on the roof of the trailer.

Two solar panels successfully mounted. 

Take a look at the closeup the first one is already quite dirty.

New and old panels side by side.

Nothing that a hose can't fix...

With the second panel the voltage was up to 60V and there was a peak of 282Watts and form 8am to night it gathered 77Ah and 1.05 kWh. And had reached the float charge state. 

Solar power x4

Now that one is shown to be working I can fill up the roof of the trailer. So we had a small delivery at work today. 

The small UPS truck delivering to OSRF

The solar panels getting unloaded. 

3 more panels to keep the lights on much brighter. 

The solar panels delivered

And stored in the trailer

All I need to do is get some angle iron and I can strap these to the roof too. 

Solar Power!

I finally mounted the solar panel on the roof of the trailer.

The solar panel on the roof of my trailer. 

You can see my shortcut to getting the cables inside the trailer is simply going through the vent.

Doing this cleanly is going to be a pain and has been much of what has been slowing me down trying to find a clean alternative. There are lots of parts and solutions. Finding a clean way to make it secure and waterproof and easy to fabricate.

Simple angle iron mounting

For the panel mounting I simply used some angle iron into the side of the panel's box. With sheet metal screws down into the roof rafters. The mounting along the roof is all lined with silicon to avoid water intrusion. I'll cover the screw tops like the other screws in the roof. 

And the results after a few days of testing are that I can get about 44 Ah into the batteries from the solar panel. It maxes out at about 124-127W peak per day in the current configuration. There are trees to the east and it's mid winter so the sun is pretty low and my mounting is very close to flat. 

Even in the shade it can produce about 60W. 

One more step toward solar power

I had some time this afternoon and have mounted up the solar charge controller in the trailer.  I need a few more cables and another breaker to finish the wiring correctly.

The solar charge controller mounted next to the batteries.

Interior Trailer Lights Running!

I've gotten a little bit distracted from the hovercraft, but I'm making progress on the trailer outfitting.  Last night I wired up my deep cycle batteries to power the trailer's 12V system.  This is usually supplied by the car, but I now can supply it internally.  And the solar panel will soon be charging the batteries.

The lights are on and it's powered internally. You can see the solar panel sitting on the side too. Waiting to get mounted on the roof.

Here's the wiring, including a battery selector and a breaker before connecting to the trailer.

Test cutting lift fan hole

I spent some time experimenting with cutting holes in the middle of the foam to be able to cut out the lift fan.

Initial scaled hole required for the lift fan

Once I had the initial lift fan hole, I then created a set of overlapping squares to make cutting with a straight knife easier.

Internal polygons to cut with the straight knife

I've been avoiding using the jigsaw to avoid lots of foam sawdust. However to get started I used a spad drill bit to make an easy way to start the cutting.  But that created a bunch of foam dust anyway. 

1" drill bit

Drilling through the foam is quick work.

Using the 4 drilled corners made cutting straight forward.

The resultant holes

Cutting between the holes

One square cut out.

After cutting out one square, I could relatively easily cut away the small corners of the offset square.

Cutting out the extra corners

 The net result was most of the area filled out.

The final resultant hole

I specifically kept the slight interior flanges so that the cowling can have something to rest on when it is installed above.  There will be some experimentation later I'm sure about how to secure and seal the cowling to the body.

Results of glue lam test

Checkout below to see the results of the glue lamination test.  

An example of filling in a patched corner.  It seems to work fine.

There's still some gaps between the foam, though it's still pretty sold.  More even weighting would also help this.

Keeping the edges aligned will be a problem.

Epoxy definitely doesn't fill in the gaps well.  It will need some filler. 

Carefully cut edges match up much better.

Another place where filler would help a lot. 

A good contrast between well cut edges and poorly cut edges.

More hovercraft news out of Russia

In Russia there's lots more excitement with respect to hovercrafts.  The largest hovercrafts in the world just show up on the beach in the summer!

There are lots of news sources covering this one little video
http://www.businessinsider.com/russian-hovercraft-on-beach-2013-8
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/10257870/Navy-hovercraft-surprises-sunbathers-as-it-lands-on-Russian-beach.html
http://gizmodo.com/giant-military-hovercraft-lands-on-crowded-beach-becaus-1178684399

To cite a few.

It appears to be a Zubr.  More info on wikipedia. 

First test of the epoxy

When Wim was here last night we also tried out gluing sheets of foam together with the epoxy from the Univeral Hovercraft Kit.

 


The epoxy provided is System Three two part epoxy.  We started out by getting the pumps setup.  Which is mostly inserting the right length tube at the end to get to the bottom of the bottle.  For the smaller one we had to cut one off by a few inches.

 

And few added some secondary containment shortly after deploying them. Since epoxy often can lead to a mess.

With the epoxy mixed we were ready to glue things together.  

We started with wax paper on the ground and layed down the 3 sheets of freshly cut foam with the new knife.  (The pattern I showed previously.  We cut a 3rd copy with the new knife in addition to the two previous ones I had cut. ) 

The very precise cuts were able to be glued on the sides well, but the cuts from previous iterations ended up with a noteable gap which the straight epoxy could not fill.  

 We built up three full layers all at once.  Just wetting the surface with epoxy seems to have done well.  We wetted the sides as well but I don't think it is holding much.

We left it to cure last night with a few weights on top.

 

This morning I took a quick peek before heading to work. It is amazingly solid but still super light.  

The first gluelam foam test

I'll look more closely as the result tomorrow, especially at the joints that I don't think are glued at all, but with the lamination it doesn't seem to matter much.

New knife blades from Bullet Tools

So in my previous posts I showed what I was able to do with the box cutters and that seemed to be reasonable.  However I felt there might be better solutions.  With a little bit of research I found that Bullet Tools has a line of products for cutting insulation.  Their Magnum Rigid Foam cutter looks like it would be very useful for large scale installers. But it's way too big for me to find useful.  However the 7" blades for utility knives looked like they might hit my requirements exactly.  They're designed for foam, and require no other infrastructure.  Though they do also mount in a reciprocating saw if I need to do some more bulk cutting.

Here some pictures of the blades.

The new razor blades as delivered.  

It's quite impressive when mounted in my utility knife handle.  It doesn't quite fold up for safety anymore. 

We  were able to successfully cut the foam very cleanly with the new knife.  See below for the example.

A successful cut.

The key we found to making a good cut was to take advantage of the length of the knife to keep it running straight and iterate in the same slot.  With the long blade you can hit the same line relatively well so as to not get parallel cuts.  This was even good enough to shave off 1/4" from the sides of the foam.

Cutting the foam with a good low angle of approach.

Our first attempt we scored the surface a little and then sawed through it with the blade almost perpendicular.  In the picture below you can see the issue was that the sawing motion drifted side to side leaving rough edges where the knife cut parallel to the original scoring.

What you get if you saw instead of slice.

PS Thanks to Wim for helping me with this.  Several of the fingers in the pictures are his.  And luckily despite the large and sharp knife all of his and mine are still attached.