Ouch, dammit! That hurts!

Yesterday I’d got a bit fed up with things and decided to go out for a change. It gets a bit old going from work to home, home to work and working on the bus when I’m not ill or working or shopping. Thus I went out to a national park some 80 miles away. I had a great time tramping along trails, seeing sights etc. The problem was I haven’t done too much walking in years. Thus by the time I was at the end of my second trail, my little legs were tired. Today, of course, they’re sore as anything. Getting under the bus was a definite no.

Thus as my solid-state relay seems to need a heat-sink and I didn’t have one, I cut a piece of aluminum to fulfill the role. That took a while as it’s an inch thick. I drilled the holes for my mounting screws to mount the thing to the bulkhead. Then I drilled the first hole for the first screw to attach the relay to my heatsink. At least - I tried to. The drill bit kept skipping so I put my glasses on and looked at the tip - broken. I wonder when that happened. I pulled out another drill bit and drilled the hole. That worked just fine. Then I tried to insert a small self-tapping screw which broke off in the hole. Very useful!

You can probably see the broken screw in the small hole just below the big hole. No chance of getting that out so back to the drawing board!

I am limited by the supplies at hand. I could rush out and buy everything I need but at this stage in construction I’m using up odds and ends and what I have on hand as I’m definitely going to have a ton of surplus materials and of course all that cost money and money as they say doesn’t grow on trees.

Looking at the size of the mounting holes on the relay, they seemed to fit a #8 screw. I bought a whole box of #8 self-drilling screws. Heaven knows where they are. I’ve looked and can’t find them. I’m not going to rush out and buy more though.

Meanwhile I realized I have some thinner aluminum. Now if I can bend that into a U shape (no guarantees or even use some of the aluminum from the bed feet and cut that into size then I can put two #8 self tappers through that thinner aluminum, use the same self-drillers to secure the lot to the bulkhead and then use some of my leftover thermal cement - if it’s not gone bad - to make a thermal bond with the aluminum heat-sink. Of course, having already worked some and having so many aches I felt somewhat disinclined toward doing any extra work so that’s a task for next weekend.