After a week and a half of cleaning, moving tools, and re-organizing the basement, my workshop is now nearly reconstituted. It was in early January when I scavenged every last useful tool from my house and the coffee shop, and put them in the Camera Craft garage. It took 3.5 months to build the helios 5 roaster oven from sheet metal and scraps & get it all working. Now that it's temporarily set up in the back of the downtown shop, I have vacated the garage until we are ready to install the solar power system. Costs less to just rent it as storage for the time being, than to be moved in and using it before it is strictly necessary.
Looked into buying the next round of carbon credits this week in order to offset the fuel we are burning in the meantime. We were featured in a segment on News First 5 this friday & we showed them our helios 3 roaster. It's kind of an inconvenient time right now, because everything is in the works, but nothing is complete yet:
-> He helios 4 is decomissioned as of last week & pending sale to PRI for conversion to a solar plastics melter.
-> The Helios 5 is running fine, albeit on natural gas. (It has finally stopped scraping and eating coffee beans, which is an excellent development. This pile of welded sheet metal just needed some time to get used to the idea of being a coffee roaster!)
-> I have three non-functioning heliostats in the lab. Now that I have my shop back under one roof, I will be able to make some progress on this front. I have switched my plans away from the use of linear motors, and am going to experiment with worm-gear driven motors. I was initally looking at a classic "T-pole" design, or a "U" type yolk to hold the mirror. I am now entertaining the idea of a "∑" (sigma) shaped framework for holding each mirror and a pair of motor boxes. More on this later.
Having a glass of wine with the wife and reading about stirling engines. A wonderful Saturday evening!
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