As you can see from the photos below, a great deal has happened since last week. As I look at the progress to date it seems amazing that it has been only two weeks working part time to get this far. Our accomplishments in the past week have included getting the wall built for the water treatment system, mounting the flour mill, sizing the pulleys and getting them installed, mounting the water treatment system and ozone generator box. We also have mocked up the fuel tank, exhaust and started to sort out the cooling system.
One of lessons this week has come down to my math skills having some problems. Willem at Old Style Lister's was kind enough to give me the formula to figure out gear ratio between driven components on the platform. Where I ran into issues was when Excel decided to get funky with my answers because I entered the data in the wrong order. The result was ordering a two groove 20.25 inch drive pulley that would have required a 30 inch pulley to drive the flour mill the problem is it will not fit. So that was nearly a $275 mistake. As dumb luck would have it to drive the seed press we happen to need a 20.25 inch pulley. So we dodged a bullet.
The biggest issues have come from some design constraints and the fact that this is not a “real world model.” Don’t get me wrong it will function and do all the things it was designed to do. However, all of the actual field models of other MFP's and the sub-components we are using are laid out on a much longer framework and this extra space availability creates far fewer problems in locating components. For instance, the ozone system is normally given several linear feet on a 7+ foot plus wall to be set up in someone’s house. In our case it has about 80 inches of wall space on a 6 foot wall. The wall is also the support frame for the radiator as well.
In the coming week, we will have all the piping and pump for the water cleaning system in place, the conduit for the electrical system run, the radiator mounted and plumbed and hopefully all of the belts ordered. Some thought will have to be given to a tensioner system for the drive belts and I think this will be one of the harder parts of the design. All of the remaining plumbing pieces will be here no later than 12/19 and we need to sort out one more pulley. I am going to spend a day on the phone this week as well to see how hard it will be to get 500 pounds of seeds to crush for oil.
