Glad the freezer worked. You just have to remember you've put it there. I've got some Henkel stuff that's probably 15 years old sitting in the freezer which I brought back from Germany with me.
We had an air conditioner problem. The main unit was 21 years old and we had it replaced earlier in the Spring. The upstairs unit, one ton smaller, is also 21 years old and two days ago stopped cooling. The diagnosis: wire from the starter capacitor had burned off. After replacing the wire, the tech tried the unit and the compressor tried to start, but didn't make it. He installed a "kick starter" unit to give it a starting boost and it's working again. But... it's living on borrowed time. I'd like to get it through to next year. Two replacements in one year is a bit much. The upstairs unit is in a closet in the eaves in the bonus room over the garage. It's not an easy place to do an installation. You can stand up in the space and there's a light and an electrical outlet in the space so it's doable.
So... I only got a couple more hours to work. So what did I do? I completed one of the filling booms including creating the mounting bracketry that will hold it to the loading deck.
I used a piece of Evergreen H-beam for the vertical support just like the prototype pic. Onto this I added some brackets, found some Evergreen round stock that telescoped into the rotating piece to act as the axle. I also had to machine a nozzle head out of the aluminum on the lathe.
I machine the larger plastic pipe to serve and the fluid junction to the boom. The prototype is much more complicated than this with piping going into the swivel joint, with gauges and other apparatus showing in the image. I chose to let this stuff off for obvious reasons. On the arm there's the counterbalance cylinder which is depicted with smaller 1/8" Plastruct tubing with the ends capped with the thin styrene sheet glued on and shaped.
The cylinders are held onto the arm with medium CA. The geometry was confusing and I first had it installed backwards and on the wrong side of the arm. It wasn't too difficult to break it off and put it in the right place. I've been making lots of parts in pairs so they'll be ready to go on the filling rig on the other end of the loading platform.
The last two pieces to add were the nozzle and the diagonal brace to support the mount. The real nozzle is perforated by openings, but the scale of this precluded me from further messing with the little machined part.
After holding the assembly in its final position I held a piece of Evergreen I-beam in place to form the diagonal brace that will be glued to the opposite side support beam. It will be epoxied in place. The beam is now glued to the upright H-Beam. I've also glued a pipe extension to the bottom of the big pipe which will hook up to the chemical supply lines. There was nothing showing how this happens so I'm riff'n. When it's all painted, it should look convincing.
Tomorrow I'll build the opposite side. The trickiest part will be making all those pipe bends going in the reverse direction. I'm sure I will screw that up at least once. It's like cutting crown molding. I still have to build the under-platform pipe racks that will connect to the booms and the plant. I've done some Google Earth searching of the Bayport/LaPorte area of Houston to see what kind of buildings there are on some of the smaller plant sites. I spent a lot of time in that region and it still blows my mind of the miles and miles of petro-chemical plants. Many that I worked at are still there. I have to finish the lighting systems and get them mounted to this construction.
