Magna TF leaking heater fix

Personal reference photos, nothing to see here.

.

Kayak beach trolley

I want a small portable trolley to move the kayaks from a holiday campsite to the beach. Generally a few hundred meters. No fun to carry them that far. Off to the hard rubbish pile I go...

I grabbed some kids bikes and took the front forks off. They mount nicely in some of the moulded drainage holes...but dont think it's gonna work out. I also have some nice planks of wood from various smashed up dresser drawers.

So maybe I'll mount the forks something like this.

...and make it look something like that... (upside down)

Boaty hull curves require some sort of shaping for my trolley.

That might work.

I bent some wire to make some hooks (no idea where I found the wire, or even why I had it), and used some ancient camping tension springs. (springs are cool, I've been holding onto these for years)

Works pretty well. :)

Bacon price check

Aldi berg short cut bacon. ~$9/kg. Short cuts can be up to ~$30/kg in the supermarkets for trimmed stuff.

There's always a lot of fat hiding in there.

Trim the fat. Less than 10mins effort. 150g portions into containers for the freezer. I usually have ~75g with x2 eggs a couple times a week.

~1/4 fat. No thanks. That's 10,175 kj right there. I just removed almost 20-25 high intensity 45min workouts in less than 10 minutes cutting it off. That's a SOLID 5-6 WEEKS OF WORKOUTS. (workout energy only, not including effects etc which is quite a lot more) No point doing a 12 week challenge, or trying to slim down if you're eating that rubbish. Go pro.

The meat now cost me ~$12/kg. Still a bargain.

4KW Solar installation

I had a 4 kiloWatt/hr solar system installed. 16 x 250W cells. The front of the house faces NE, so I had the panels split across the NE and NW face to optimise the day's collection. I got as many as I could on the NW face which was 7 cells. The remaining 9 are installed on the larger NE face. The strings are independently isolated, plugged into a 5kW inverter on the SE face of the house (always out of the sun). The inverter accommodates 2 strings. I didn't have the cash for microInverters, or tilt-kits. Given that I'm not facing ENE or WNW, it should be fine anyhow. Our roofs tilt is ~30' which is a nice average between a steep winter angle, and a really shallow summer angle. Here are some shots.

Installer guys...

9 panels on the NE front face of the house. Plenty of room for more.

7 panels on the NW face.

Inverter installed close to the mains power meter box on the SE face of the house.

System has been up for ~2.5hrs since the install was completed. Nice day, lots of patchy clouds, maybe 70% clear sky. Generated 8kW in a couple hours, many daylight hours left. (you can see it's 1pm in the shot). Really nice. Sitting on 4.3kW in full sun with two strings at non-optimal angles. Really pleased.

EZ Curl Bar from hard rubbish

My boss found an old EZ-Curl weights bar rusting out somewhere on a new property he purchased. He chucked it out...so I grabbed it. :)

It's pretty messed up.

But a wire brush and rust treatment can fix that.

I even made up some new collars for it. 500grams each. Works really well. Saved me quite a few bucks, these bars are expensive!!

Socket Set refurb

Amongst the many piles of displaced tools at work, I managed over several weeks re-build this old 1/4' socket set to what appears to be a mostly complete set. Some of the sockets don't match, but I think I found most of the original minimax hand tools intended to be in there.

The plastic inserts were rubbish, so I made a timber replacement, and added some magnets to hold some non-ideal stray parts. The case was stripped back, rust treated, and repainted with some hammer-tone. Obvious process pics below.

I'm re-gifting it back to the boss. Chances are he didn't realise it was gone...oh well, fun to play on the mill with timber anyhow. I'll make up a little X,Y screw advance jig for my drill press at some point as it was a real treat to work on.

It came up lookin' pretty neat.