Slow Build in Oz

[MickinOz]

haHa! I wish you'd stolen it, too.
Well, not really, I prefer to hang with honest people.
But still, it'd be awesome to see it now.
I really don't have much wilderness experience.
I grew up on farms, but got a semi scientific job when I was 16. I'm an assayer, from back in the day when that was a trade.

When you came out of that Yukon Territory with a bagful of rocks and wanted to know how much gold was in 'em, I was your man.
Troy onces per imperial ton, long ton, short ton. Grams per dry metric tonne, mg/kg, ug/g, Zolotniks per 100 poods, I loved it, but that trade is gone now.

Ended up living in town, and once the kids came along life got kinda busy, and expensive.
I did manage to hang onto my firearms through all the knee jerk reaction to Port Arthur, and I've recently (last 5 years) resumed a little hunting and target shooting.

I'm coming up on 60, I've saved as much as I can over 44 years of working for my living. An appointment with a financial advisor later this month may see me retiring in the New Year.
I want the camper finished, still looking for a rural home to retire to.
Then the Bush beckons.

[MickinOz]

Ribs.JPG (40.13 KiB) Viewed 2722 times

Didn't do the "sort out the tools and clear the workbench" thing today.
Trouble is, I still had the table from the outdoor setting to go.
So I put it to use.
Made ribs.
I made a template to make a template.
I used the stapler to stick enough off cuts of 7mm ply together to get a piece I could stand up in the galley and scribe the profile of the left side wall.
Cut it out with a jigsaw, and used that to mark my 17mm sheet.
Cut that a little proud of the line.
Marked a heap of spots 55mm in from the first line, knocked in a heap of small nails, bent an off cut of 3mm around the curve and scribed the inner line.
So the cross section of my ribs will be approximately 55 x 17.
So I cut along the inner curve, and got myself a rib.
I clamped this back onto the side or the trailer, and used a trimmer bit in the router to trim exactly to the shape of the side wall.
By the time I finished that I had a rib that fitted perfectly alongside the rear radius(es).

So I used that to cut out 6 more ribs. Traced around my template rib, and roughed 'em out with the jigsaw.
Then I cooked dinner for the missus when she got home from work.
Tomorrow I will screw the template rib to each of the others in turn, and use the router again to trim them all the same.

[tony.latham]

When you came out of that Yukon Territory with a bagful of rocks and wanted to know how much gold was in 'em, I was your man.

Tony

[MickinOz]

Advances this day.
Fitted the lower bulkhead/foot board, and installed the counter top.
The lower foot board is 7mm plywood, with three "stiffeners" attached to the galley side.

Pretty happy with the accuracy of the fit, and the way we are managing to pull everything straight as we go.
The 7mm ply I am using is actually made for the job of bracing frames square.
The 15mm ply I used for the counter is very strong
My electrical contractor son was installing GPO's in a home where they were pulling out a melamine laundry cupboard due to some white ant damage.
There was a stack of salvageable panels that he uses for installing load centres in shed wiring jobs.
There was also a couple of these sliding wire basket things. There is room for one under the counter on the left side, with a slide out for the stove between it and the counter.
The other two thirds has room for battery, fridge and water. Looks like I'll be able put some sort of drawer or slide out counter under the right side as well.

Counter top and foot board.JPG (116.54 KiB) Viewed 2624 times

[edgeau]

Score!

Sent from my Pixel 3 using Tapatalk

[MickinOz]

I've been quite cost conscious on this project.
In principle, I do agree that
a) You get what you pay for, and
b) The quality is remembered long after the price is forgotten.

On the other hand, you can't go Rolls Royce on a Belmont budget.
(For those not in Australia, for local home grown Holden cars, Belmont was the cheapest, lowest spec car you could buy.)

So I chase the appropriate quality, not buying something just because its cheap, but not buying the best if it is truly unnecessary.
Enter our new solar regulator.
I wanted Maximum Power Point Tracking.
You can get a lot more out of a solar panel if you have a MPPT regulator, even if you have a (nominally) 12V panel.

If you happen to have, as we do, a panel that makes its max power at waaay higher than 12V, then you won't get full power into your system with an ordinary pulse width modulated charge controller.
So our 250 watt panel at maximum output makes a little over 8 amps at around 31 volts.
With a PWM regulator into a 12V system, it is only going to put that 8 amps in.
8 point something amps at say 13.6 volts = around 110 watts max.
So a good 50% + of the available power from that panel would be wasted.

A MPPT controller is a DC to DC converter.
It takes volts x amps = watts at the maximum power available and converts it to volts x amps = watts at the right voltage for the battery.
Conversion efficiency above 90% means we'll get most of the power from the panel.

But, they can be so expensive that you are sometimes better off just buying a panel of the right voltage. Except we have that nice tier one panel already.
Victron regulators are a bit of a gold standard over here, but a 75/15 MPPT (75V in, 15 amps charging) will run around $140 or so. Plus delivery in these no face-to-face shopping times.
And 15 amps is right where our system could be sitting in the right conditions. No equipment lasts well when you hold the pedal to the metal.
So I wanted to go a bit bigger capacity, especially since I wanted to switch most of the load through the controller to avoid inadvertent excessively deep discharge of the battery. But, the next step up in the Victron range is way over $200.

Ebay has 20A MPPT charge controllers for about $35.
EXCEPT, they very often are not genuinely MPPT.
Just check out you tube, and you'll see what I'm saying.
Ya get what ya pay for.

So I'm looking harder, and a brand called Renogy catches my eye. Started in America, allegedly.
Recently built US cars have a poor reputation over here ever since a guy very famously destroyed his lemon of a Jeep, which isn't really fair - seems the issue was more about business practices. Still, the laundry list of problems he had with the car gives one pause for thought re: American build quality.
But I'm thinking that I haven't read anything bad about these Renogy controllers.

They are pricier than the usual Ebay specials, but not as dear as a Victron.
20 amp controller on Ebay, $100. Not too ugly, but lets do a little research on what they can and can't do.
That's when I found the Renogy Australia website just as it was running a special sale, since ended, of $80 delivered for a 20 amp controller.
Best thing, if you happen to have say a 300W panel, you can hook it up and worst that will happen is the controller will only run 20 amps into the battery.
Can set parameters for AGM, Lithium, SLA. Flooded, etc.
Remote battery temperature sensing - I will be hooking that up.
Bluetooth module available as an optional extra.

It arrived today.
Very impressive.
The weight alone makes me think it must at least have a couple of toroidal transformers in there. I believe most genuine MPPT charge controllers do.

The manual is obviously written by a native English speaker.
The company address is Ontario Canada.
So, I'm feeling very confident.

[edgeau]

My charger (bought second hand) is on the way out so I will be very interested in your experience with that one.

Sent from my Pixel 3 using Tapatalk

[edgeau]

Oh and I owned a Jeep Wrangler for years before we had Kids and loved it. The only reliability issue I had was when the catalytic converter collapsed and blocked the exhaust. Of course that happened the back of whoop whoop and after nursing it into the nearest town the local mechanic had no idea because it wasn't a Land Cruiser

Sent from my Pixel 3 using Tapatalk

[MickinOz]

Wrangler is the one I'd be prepared to buy.

[MickinOz]

What charger did you buy?

[edgeau]

Sunyoba

Sent from my Pixel 3 using Tapatalk

[MickinOz]

The biggest problem with Toyotas, be the Landcruisers or Hilux is that if three bolts will hold something together, they'll use 6 or 8.
Fair dinkum, my GT falcon had two bolts holding the gearbox cross member on. My son's Hilux had 8.

[MickinOz]

Sunyoba

Sent from my Pixel 3 using Tapatalk

i look forward to comparing notes/

[MickinOz]

Reading Tony's build #4 log, he mentioned he had about 9 good years out of his first tear drop, but it had a few issues with regard to the galley walls. He said it was important to tie the walls together with the counter top. It really seems like a lot of teardrops just rely on 1/2 or 3/4 of inch of ply staying stiff enough to remain where you want it.
I can vouch for this being a problem. The right side wall in particular had more bends in it than Horrock's Pass. That's a lot of bends. In fact, I didn't think it was possible for plywood to bend on so many axes at once.
So I spent a fair bit of time with braces and straps and clamps pulling the walls in to line on whichever axis worked, before putting in the roof, the counter top, and the bulkhead, etc.
It worked. Each bit did its part and the walls became progressively straighter. Every panel is a stressed member, which I personally don't consider a bad thing.
Last job was to stiffen those big curved edges.
I cut far more hatch frames than needed, specifically so I could laminate a couple of frames.
I actually laminated them with "kinks" opposite to the ones I wanted to straighten out in the walls, so when I pulled it all together they had some chance of canceling each other out.
Seems to have worked.
Along the way, I offset the two frames I laminated together by 6mm. This gives me a 6 - 7 mm deep by 17mm wide groove in which to run the hatch seal.
Seemed easier than doing anything with a router to create a place to put the seal.
Sadly, I shall remain a far better metallurgist and assayer than wood butcher and photographer.

stiffeners installed 18.4.2020.JPG (82.44 KiB) Viewed 2506 times

Does this look straight?

Right side 18.4.2020.JPG (72.1 KiB) Viewed 2506 times

In the groove

Groove for seal 18.4.2020.JPG (74.05 KiB) Viewed 2506 times

[swoody126]

many of us who dabble in boatbuilding have seen the videos of how plywood is made which explains a lot

by nature the elements/plies combined to create plywood are wonky due to how they are cut

they buck n bawl as they are cut off the log refusing to lay flat

after being pressed into submission w/ great pressure n heat activated glue they twist n yaw even at rest

this is butt one element of my reasoning for buying/using marine plywood when building something important to me

by increasing the number of plies/given thickness you get a much more stable panel

quality marine plywood will typically have 5 plies/6mm(1/4") 7plies/9mm(3/8") up to 13plies/19mm(3/4")

and virtually all the plies are veneer plies of the same wood of the same thickness

the marine pywood has darn near zero voids and virtually no flaws on the surfaces

sorry to seemingly go off track here butt this thread is bringing out some of the issues created by using lesser grades of plywood in construction and i thought it could possibly help others in future builds

if not by their buying better plywood by at least helping future builders understand why the materials behave the way they do

if you ever get a chance to peruse one of CLC's teardrops you'll understand what i'm talking about

lesson over

sw