Sunday, June 11, 2017

When things go pear shaped...

I generally find when things begin to go pear shaped, it's time to cut and run. That's pretty much what I did today.

My day started with a grueling food shopping marathon. I do live with 4 adults and 4 dogs in a small trailer in the backwoods of South Carolina. It's so backwoods here that the road is a dirt track and the neighbor down the road displays a Confederate flag in his yard. Anyway, the shopping expedition seems to last about 4 or 5 hours, once a month.

Returning to the bus, I was tired and hot. Still, I added a missing piece to the construction shown yesterday and fixed a few welds that weren't air tight. Then I set to and ground flat the welds on the side that will face the bus skirt. Now that's nice and smooth.

Then I started work on the retainer that will hold the filter in place. Immediately, it went wrong. Somehow my carefully clamped angle brackets shifted in relation to each other while I welded. Time to call it a day!

No picture today because quite frankly I've not changed anything enough to merit another photo. Mediocre progress but that's the problem with working in 90F. One other thing of note happened. I'd been thinking how to clean my welded ventilation unit prior to painting and decided sand blasting would work best. As sand contains silica - the major cause of silicosis - I decided to use granulated sugar instead. It's cheap, plentiful, biodegradable and non hazardous. Thus I bought a packet.

The next thing to do is to build the door for the ventilation unit then attach mounting lugs to the unit. After that it's a case of media blasting, painting and mounting.

The pipe I welded on is a little bigger than needed. I'm going to have a challenge fitting to a 1.32 inch tube. I'll sort it out though.

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