A quick catch-up to where we are now - tried to post this 2 weeks ago, but a combination of temperamental internet and holidays prevented that. So...
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| Frames are up. |
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| Our sheets of aluminium had grooves pressed into them by a guy with a hydraulic press. This should enable the fins to be made in one shiny piece... |
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| ...or at least it would have, had the guys at the metalwork yard, on finding that they didn't have a die the right size, not gone ahead and done it anyway with the smallest one they had... |
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| ...meaning that we had to improvise a method of squeezing the fins so that they fit tightly around the copper tubes for good thermal transfer... |
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| ...which in turn meant slicing up our nice big shiny multiple-grooved sheets (or at least paying a guy in the bazaar with some big scissors to do it for us)... |
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| ...and slicing up our left-over sheets to fill in the gaps... |
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| ...thus giving us double the number of nuts and bolts to do up. Sigh. And just to further illustrate the way things work(!) here, we were well into our third panel (with around 286 nuts/ bolts per panel) before my boss casually mentioned "I've got an electric screwdriver here - do you want to use it? |
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| Panel 1 of 10. Two of us managed six between us before we went on holiday, by which time the guy I was working with had learned enough to carry on and finish them by the time we arrived back yesterday. Twice the amount of work, and not as aesthetically pleasing, but after 2 or 3 thousand nuts, bolts and washers and a dozen or so tubes of silicone: Job Done. |
