Dreadful rain

Today was horribly rainy. It was forecast to be 80% rain as is tomorrow so not a whole lot got done in the dry. I did work on some plywood and had to use a manual saw because of the wet and my not wanting to have the shocking experience of an electric saw.

A few days ago, the 8-32 tap that I'd ordered, arrived so I set to work and within a few minutes I'd fixed the 8-32 thread in the aluminium rivnut that had warped due to over-tightening. The light was reassembled and just in the nick of time because shortly after down came the rain.

In a gap between showers I grabbed a small piece of plywood. This had originally been destined for a kitchen unit I'd been building in the house. That had been put on hold because Lowes (hiss, spit) wood - even the 2x4 - was warping badly. Even the stuff I'd laid flat in order that it would dry straight had warped. Clearly something is amiss at Lowes. Maybe they're just buying wood from China? Anyway, the project components had lain abandoned in the storage shed for the best part of a year.

I would, normally, have gone and bought OSB since the rest of the wall in the bedroom is OSB but I'd better back up a bit. I'm going to skin over the back windows, four windows on one side and five on the other for several reasons and the top half of two windows in the bedroom had been left uncovered and usable. Last time I slept in the bus - a couple of years ago - I almost put my elbow through the window so I decided to skin over the inside also. Currently the $10 OSB that I used to buy is going for $45 in ripoff Lowes. Thus I'm going to use what I have at hand. That's a piece of plywood from a partially constructed kitchen unit project that I abandoned.

The weather was awful - intermittent rain and sunshine. Clearly cutting with an electric saw was no good. Indeed, that might well have turned out to be a shockingly bad idea. Thus I went for the manual option of an ordinary hand saw. I like manual tools. No thief would ever steal a manual tool because he likely couldn't fence it. 

So I'd measured my aperture at 55 inches by 13 and I'd marked my wood. During the cutting process I lost count of the number of times I had to grab the wood and my tools and run for shelter. 

The wood cut quite well and keeping the saw at a fairly shallow angle, the cuts came out straighter than if I'd used an electric saw. This and the controlability is why I prefer manual saws. I use electric for speed but for sheer craftsmanship manual cannot be beaten.

There is a slight gap under the plywood because of the cut of the OSB underneath. That won't notice when the gap is caulked and the metal sheet put on the outside. Two screws in the middle will fasten the plywood to the bus and I'll use construction adhesive at the ends to fasten it to the bus and the other woodwork. It goes against my philosophy of everything being removable with a screwdriver but these adhesives rarely hold things that strongly.

Having cut the wood I went to paint it with the remains of my pot of Valspar Cosmic Pink. That did not go well. It seems that the paint had settled and solidified since I used it last in 2015. It had not evaporated. Instead everything had gone solid. After spending a long time with an electric paint stirrer I did break up the solids but even so, not enough to make the paint usable. I guess I'll have to (shudder) part with more money and buy a small pot of Valspar Cosmic Pink. This time though I'll probably buy oil paint.

Meanwhile the battery terminal connectors arrived for my thicker cables. That means I can replace the puny connectors not designed for heavy use that I'm using on one of my batteries. The Anderson 30A power connectors I'd ordered seem to be being drop shipped. I'd hoped to avoid that nonsense! I am familiar with the trick - the connectors are advertised at an irresistible price then the ship date keeps being moved further out and then in a couple of months they do actually arrive. That's the problem when you buy online.

The other day I found a long cable I'd put in cable wrap that was destined to go under the bus from the driving battery box to the junction of my two lithium batteries. If the lithium batteries will last a year of use then I might put an extra one in with the driving batteries or maybe even just switch the existing batteries forward to the battery compartment.

Meanwhile an interesting thing happened. I now have two batteries connected in parallel. I turned on my extraction fans and all the power went off and the lights went off for a few seconds. Then it all came back on again. I had 3 lights on with a maximum draw of 0.3A between them. My twin 2.5A fans came on for a total consumption of 5.3A according to the book. The controller is good for 20A. After that, the voltage in the battery declined while the fan was on but bounced right back when it went off.  I am thus wondering if the 20A fuse connected to one of the batteries somehow blew or whether I tripped one of my self-resetting breakers. The next dry spell I shall have to check that fuse.

When I have the metal sheeting ordered, painted and attached over the windows and the security bars put over the others I shall be freer to experiment with my extraction fans. It might be that the powerful fans I have just don't work that well at removing heat. They work well at extracting air but my old CPU fans did that quite adequately. It could be that I might be well advised to use lower-powered fans running constantly. I shall have to experiment.