It has been slow going as we have been waiting on parts and life has been a little busy as well. Here are the updates. I laid out the back plan of the control board and this is where things are going to go. Looks fairly clean at this point without all the wiring. This was completed on 1-20-2012
The chugger pumps arrived on 1-23-2013. I have heard they have been banned from the site which is sad, un-American, etc in so many ways. I could write on about this for a long time but it is BS that all the vendors (who make money off reselling march pumps) ran him off.
A lot of the vertical build I have seen mount both pumps towards the bottom. I agree with this in a way, but we are only going to mount one at the bottom to reduce the amount of liquid being wasted in the lines and losing heat when going through the lines. Here is a picture of the mounting of the bottom pump. Note the use of expensive John Deere metal which came out of an iron pile at some point.
Here is the mounting of the top pump. It is mounted right below the HLT tank to reduce the hose lengths and reduce heat lose. BTW: I am a Kid Rock fan, but I really didn’t mean to frame him in this picture.
As noted in a previous post, I changed the mounting of the CFC so that it will drain out. I basically took two pieces of angle iron, welded them to the MLT tank mount, notched the angle iron so I could slide zip ties through it and zip tied it down. You can also see in the picture that the temp gauge for the CFC has been mounted.
On to the control panel. I had to move construction of control panel into the house as the garage gets a little cold this time of year. I set up shop in the dining room until I had the mess from hanging drywall in the basement cleaned up. This of course made the wife happy as random pieces of wire laying on the floor wasn’t her idea of a good time. I locked myself into the basement and finished wiring it around 230 am one morning.
Here is a picture of the inside of it. I am going to clean it up after I get it working.
Last Saturday morning I lugged the unit out to the garage and plugged it in. I was being careful as I was sure something wouldn’t work correctly. I was correct which of course wasn’t good. After doing some testing I turn the main switch on, but the main relay didn’t engage. After doing some more voltage checking I did some reading on the relays we purchased and determined they were 110 volt DC relays instead of AC relays. Grrr. I ordered the correct relays yesterday and they should be here on tomorrow. I am head back to my parents’ house to make sausage tomorrow night, but plan on swapping the relay on Sunday morning. With any luck we will have the first batch completed before kickoff of the super bowl, but I am not holding my breath.
Linear Mode
.gif-1367621329.gif)
