Ouch! That was eye-watering!

After a rough night of little sleep I was bumbling around when my phone played Ride of the Valkyrie at full volume. It was the steel company. My cut 14 gauge steel was ready. Thus, after a leisurely breakfast I found some cocktail sticks in the kitchen drawer and propped my eyelids open. Finding they were bending under the strain I applied duct tape. That was fine!

So I drove to the local steel company and paid - an eye-watering $186. I'm pretty sure I could have had used steel for a lot less. The only problem - the local scrapyards have all vanished and the local school districts won't say where they sell their old busses despite the fact I work for one of them!

I have 4 pieces of 14 gauge steel. That stuff is heavy. I had not realized how heavy 14 gauge is. Wow! It was well worthwhile having them pre-cut. Two will need to have a cutout in a corner but that's no biggie. I have an angle grinder. 

That's what the steel looks like. According to the document there's 57 pounds weight there. The guy came out with it, holding the whole lot out in front of him as though it weighed nothing. I'm probably going to have a job moving the biggest sheet into place. It's up high so I'll probably need to work from some kind of platform. Perhaps I'll need to park the pickup truck round the back of the bus to work on the upper windows. That's a little way off though. 

The first panel will replace the panel I welded over the window. This time I'll rivet the panel. Looking at the way the bus is put together I will need to use broad-head rivets and space my rivets at one every 3 inches. That's doable. I'm probably going to be using something in the region of 30 rivets on the bottom panel. Thank heavens I got an air riveter from Harbor Freight! Before I rivet I'll slap a layer of caulk between the new panel and the body. 

In time I will rivet over the top window since that is recessed. The two side windows will have to be removed. That's easy enough. I'll have to rivet panels over those window spaces. The aim is to have no glass on the rear of the bus. That will make the back much more secure. 

As it was a day of light showers and dim lighting, I got on with putting connectors on the three solar panels that I'd removed from the frame I'd built. Though I miss having a permanently mounted panel on the front of the bus from a power perspective, I find it looks a lot better without.

These connectors, of which I have only 5 pairs will be good for my five 10W panels. I originally had longer wires coming from each panel. That was such a nuisance because I was forever standing on one wire while trying to lift all the panels. Now I have very short wires with connectors.

The other end of the connector goes into a 4-way connector and to an SAE plug. That way it's all still compatible with my existing SAE system. People have tried to shout me down over my choice of SAE over MC4 connectors but that's all it is - noise. There's no rational reason why any of my panels will need more than an SAE connector. The 10W panels certainly need no more of a connector than the pin connectors I've used.

There are the connectors and the short wires. The cables have been cut to about 8 inches. When I put them away after testing the newly wired setup, I had no problem at all. The cable rolled up easily. The panels stowed easily. I didn't have to fight with the heavy frame I'd had them in. I have another two 10W panels that I'll have to do the same thing with. My two 20W panels might just get SAE connectors. Again, I'll put short cables. I might even shorten (again) the cables on my two 30W panels when my extra SAE connectors arrive.

There are the three panels. Small, light and easy to handle. Together they are 30W and being so small they can easily be leaned on things as small as a pair of sneakers to put them at the perfect angle.

There you can see just how worthless the day was for solar power generation. Between the three of them I was generating about 0.1W. That's something like 0.3% of what I should have been generating. No wonder the house battery on the bus was down to 61% at one point. I would be amazed if it went to 100%. Actually I don't think it reaches 100% any more. I think the batteries have lost capacity in rather less of the way a fat woman joins Weight Watchers but more in the way my wallet loses money when I pass a hardware store!