Tag Archives: soldering

Wednesday 4th November 2015 – WELL I DIDN’T …

… cut up any wood today either.

Awake once again after the alarm went off, then after breakfast I cracked on with my studies and I’m making progress. So much so that I’m actually enjoying this course. It’s certainly making me think, which is what is the aim of it all, after all.

I had a phone call too. “Your order is now at the transport warehouse. To arrange an appointment for delivery, please call 0899 …..” But what kind of tree do these people think that I have fallen out of? For a start, I don’t have any orders outstanding. But secondly, I know all about these 0899 phone numbers. They are not free-phone numbers but uncontrolled premium rate lines and telephone companies should be censured for lumping them along with the other “08” numbers because a call to a 0899 number will cost you about €130 a time. It’s not free like you might be thinking, and telephone companies should identify them properly.

Beautiful and bright it was, this morning but by the time I went downstairs the sun had gone in and we were all overcast. Not enough power to run the chopsaw so that will have to wait for another time. Instead, I attacked the 12-volt immersion heater.

It’s all assembled now and there are no leaks as far as I can tell, and so I went to make uo the cables. And first off, I can’t find any 10mm cable despite turning the house and the lean-to upside down. In the end, I’ve had to use 6mm cable and that’s not doing to be enough.

I crimped the ring terminals onto the cables and then cut off the insulation because I’m going to solder them on. And so that meant hunting around for the solder and the little gas pistol. I eventually found them but the gas pistol wouldn’t work, no matter how much gas I put into it. In the end I dismantled it, only to find that the jet was blocked with a piece of solder. Pushing that out damaged the jet and so the subsequent flame was pretty much uncontrollable and took ages to solder up all of the cables.

So even though it was 18:55 when I knocked off, I felt as if I’d done nothing at all today what with all of this nonsense.

Tonight I’ve had a tea too – pasta with vegetables, boulghour and tomato sauce. I felt like it too, for the first time for ages.

Monday 2nd March 2015 – I DIDN’T GET …

… as much done as I wanted to today – but then I had quite an interruption round about lunchtime.

I struggled to get out of bed this morning, but nevertheless I cracked on with my stuff about Algeria and managed to finish that, at least, even though I was late going down to work.

I managed to fit all of the framework for the upper doors, although one piece had to be recut after it split while I was malleting it into position. All of that took much longer than I anticipated, due mainly to my having to cut a couple more fascia pieces as the ones that I had set aside were not strong enough.

Once that had been done, I went out to fetch a pile of floorboards from Caliburn and then made the first of the upper doors.

But this was when I noticed the smell of burning.

We had a brief patch of sun today and I ended up with 45 amp-hours of power going down the cables to the home-made 12-volt immersion heater. It seems that the connector on the positive cable wasn’t up to that and the connection was arcing out. I ended up having to cut it off, fit a new connector, cut off the insulation and then solder it using the new gas soldering gun that Terry bought me for Christmas.

My soldering is total rubbish as you know, but it has to be better than my crimping, so it seems. and it was then that I noticed that the thread appears to be stripped in the heater element. I had to remove the screw and do my best with a nut and bolt, but that’s not looking so good and I’m going to have to deal with this.

All in all, I ended up having lunch at about 16:30.

Back at work I carried on until 19:00. All of the hinges are in place but the door needs trimming down. That’s not the kind of thing that you can do when you are tired and so I’ll be dealing with that first thing tomorrow.

Friday 18th November 2011 – WHEN I TELL YOU …

… that I knocked off at 17:27 today, you will probably think something like “idle burger” or something like that.

But not a bit of it.

In fact, 17:27 was when I stopped for lunch.

installing wind turbine les guis virlet puy de dome francePutting this wind turbine was not as easy as you might think.

First thing was to solder two longer wires to the couple of inches that come out of the wind turbine. My soldering is total rubbish, and what didn’t help was that the heavy-duty soldering iron I bought from LIDL ages ago didn’t want to work properly.

After trying a couple of others, it was the ancient soldering iron that I had bought from Tandy (and that tells you how old it is) that did some kind of a job on the wiring.

installing wind turbine les guis virlet puy de dome franceCollecting all the tools, I then went off up the ladder to the top of the scaffolding (and you can see how high I was as well – right at the top and that was nerve-wracking) and that wasn’t easy either.

One of the more difficult issues was fitting the wind turbine through the hatch in the lean-to floor. I had to dismantle the blasted thing, carry it through and up the ladder and then reassemble it on top.

Passing the wire down the tube was something else as well. For some reason it didn’t want to go down and I had to spend an age persuading it.

installing wind turbine les guis virlet puy de dome franceFitting the wind turbine on the pole was exciting as well and it was quite a feat of balance to do that on a scaffolding like that.

I then had to fix the rudder back on the wind turbine but that was something of an issue as it seemed that the captive nut that holds the rudder on had sheared off. And so that meant climbing right up there, undoing the side of the turbine, and putting a nut and bolt in place.

It was at that moment that the wind sprang up, and if it wasn’t easy before, then trying to do this right up there with the thing swinging around and the blades going round like the clappers – that just made it worse.

But anyway it’s up there, and it’s all wired in as well. But I couldn’t solder up the wires which was annoying – not even the Tandy soldering iron would do that – and so I’ve had to use chocolate blocks for that and the sheath that I put over the conduit now won’t cover up the joints.

As you can tell, it wasn’t easy and it was no wonder that,having decided to work right through until I finished, it was so late when I came to a stop. And I wasn’t feeling like carrying on.

But anyway, having been hit in the face by the turning blades on occasions too numerous to count, I know that it works. It will be interesting to see what power it gives out.