This one will be long with a lot of photos…no teaser photo for the front though.

I guess I’ll do this chronologically.  As per my last post I ended up going back and buying another tarp at the “Bargain” warehouse for $20 more than the last one cost me.  We then proceeded to try and get it up as quickly as possible Friday night in case the wind/rain came back.  That was no fun at all.  The other tarp went up easier than I had expected, this one fought us every step of the way and the extreme humidity made it just flat out miserable.  I soaked two shirts with sweat fighting to get that thing up…and had to take a break partway through to buy more rope because the 100 feet we started with just wasn’t enough.  I had planned on treating us to a nice dinner when we were done – but by the time I was done and showered the only place open was Applebees – who set a new low for service that night   Oh well, at least my “Perfect Margarita” pretty much was perfect and that did help!

The new tarp is on 90 degrees different than the last one, so we’ll see how that works out.  If you compare to the older photos you’ll see that the first replacement tarp has tightened up significantly since I put it up there.  I’m hoping this one does as well since it’s kind of loose and flappy right now:

From across the street showing the top of the new tarp.

From under the new tarp

Really, I’m not as overjoyed with the new tarp as I expected to be.  I was kind of looking forward to the white tarp so there would be better light under the carport for when I work on the vehicles.  And yes there is better light…but it seems like too much now.  Almost like there isn’t shade at all.  From the photos you can see that YES there is shade…but when you’re under there it’s bright.  Also means a lot more light coming in through the living room and kitchen windows.  Time will tell if I like it or not.  I’m thinking the next time we replace them I’ll get two layer tarps that are black on top and white on the bottom so they’ll give more shade but the white bottom will still be nice when working under there.

So moving on to Saturday.  We started out the day by going over to look at some darkroom equipment some people e-mailed Amy about after they saw her blog in the paper.  We didn’t have very high hopes…but it turned out they were a real friendly couple about our age and the gear was pretty nice.   We ended up buying a couple of things:

"New" enlarger

The Beseler 23C was the enlarger Amy learned to print on…so passing this up would have been hard!  It’s in great shape, just a little dusty.  Only has the 6×6 negative carrier (but oddly enough only a 50mm lens – 6×6 should have a 80mm lens) but we can get new carriers on ebay I’m sure.  We also picked up an orignal pre 45 Weston Master light meter, a Sekonic light meter, a fixed size enlarging easel that Amy liked, an Omega color analyizer and some safelights.  While we didn’t NEED another enlarger (I still have another Durts M670 in my parents basement and a Beseler 45 that I’m not sure how I’ll ever get out here since it’s so big!) the 23C does complement my Durst nicely.

The Durst is a diffusion color head with a quartz lamp.  That gives a soft light effect which tends to hide dust and scratches a little but at the cost of some fine detail and sharpness.  The 23C has a condenser head (though a diffusion head and a cold light head are available used) which gives a harsher light that results in dust and scratches showing easier…but also a sharper final image.  So having one of each gives us the best of both worlds letting us pick the right tool for each job!

With the new toys settled in we went out and did a little shopping for a piece of pegboard to hang in the laundry room to organize darkroom stuff, and look for a cabinet to put in there and the final things I needed to finish light proofing and ventilating the room.  The new cabinets at Lowes were nice, but more cash than we could justify – espically after having just bought a used enlarger we didn’t really need.  But the Habitat for Humanity restore used home improvement store had a few “gently” pre-owned cabinets that looked like they may work…we just needed to double check out measurements and come back the next day since they were closing soon.

A quick stop at the camera store for some more ID-11 and another pack of paper we found that they had another nice safelight on consignment which I picked up and they had Ilford Delta 100 in 120 in stock so we picked up a few rolls to shoot.  We went home and loaded up Amy’s Grandfathers Rolleicord and my Lubitel – then stopped back at the shop to put the Nikon 6006 my mom had given Amy a few years back up for sale in hopes it will help some student just getting started.  We then proceeded to snap a few shots around the river and downtown before coming home to dunk them in the developer.

We both managed to overexpose most of our shots.  Mine I was aiming for about 1 stop over exposed so I wasn’t surprised, they’re still very printable and I’m dying to see how a few of them enlarge.  Amy’s were a bit more overexposed than either of us expected, not sure if it was due to the odd aperture/shutter choices available on the camera, Amy’s unfamiliarity with the camera and light meter, the shutter possibly being a bit slow on the 75+ year old camera…or a combination of one or more of those.  It also seems there may be a small light leak in the camera, but it could just be Amy’s unfamiliarity with 120 film loading/unloading.  We’ll see after I get to run a roll through it.  She also only got 8 exposures due to us not realizing that the Rollei had a frame counter and automatic film advance stop that we were supposed to use instead of the red filter peep hole on the bottom.  oops.

On the plus side the lens is VERY sharp and she did get a few good shots.  I’m looking forward to being able to share them here soon!

Sunday we went back to the Habitat store and for $15 picked up a cabinet.  Loading it into the truck I started to have second thoughts though as part of the toe kick fell off.  The whole thing was pretty shakey.  And before we got it out of the truck the concrete and ceramic top (which we had planned on removing anyway) was falling off.  In fact the whole thing was in danger of collapsing under it’s own weight.  There was no back and the old particle board it was made of was not holding together very well.  I didn’t get a photo of it in it’s original state but here it is with the top and toe kick removed as Amy starts to clean it in preparation for paint:

"original" condition of cabinet

We gave it two good heavy coats of Kilz premium primer to seal in any mold or mildew that may have been lurking within it – and to keep out any that conditions in the laundry room / darkroom would subject it to.  We then decided to give it a coat of the light blue paint we had originally bought for our spare bedroom but decided not to use.  With the nearly full gallon sitting there I decided to just bite the bullet and paint the laundry room as well.  One less salmon colored room!  Only two left!  Our own bedroom and the back bedroom.  Our bedroom won’t be getting painted for awhile due to lack of space to move stuff around in there.  The back bedroom will probably wait as well since we have plans to make some major modificaitons back there semi-soon.

Before - from dining room

Before from back bedroom.

After - from dining room

After - From Back Bedroom, also note the new pegboard behind the sink and cabinet.

The laundry room feels a LOT bigger and cleaner now with the fresh coat of light blue paint!  It’s not perfect, I still have to trim around the fold out ironing board and above the washer dryer…and I was too lazy to move the washer dryer so there’s still salmon hiding behind them and the washtub…but overall it’s a BIG improvement!

I also finished installing the bathroom fan I bought a week or two ago – and you can see how we put a safelight bulb in one of the two overhead lights in the laundry room.  When we moved in we thought it was silly that there were two light circuits in such a small room – now it’s just what we needed!

Safelight and vent fan.

I know, I still need to wire the fan in.  I also want to add an outlet for the timer in that area and I want to move the lights and outlets in this room onto their own circuit anyway since the one they’re on now is shared with the kitchen and IMHO way overloaded.  With no attic access in this area though it won’t be much fun to pull the wires

The duct from the fan goes out to an old dryer exhaust duct in the water heater closet.  It had one way flaps on it so I know it wasn’t there to allow air to come in for the water heater vent and works perfect for our needs, I do want to fill in around it with some expanding foam though to block out any final light leaks and make sure it’s a good permanant seal.  The path the duct takes should prevent any light from coming in through the fan itself – and if not that duct will easily expand enough that I can reroute it to make sure no light will get in:

Vent duct.

There’s another vent near the floor in that closet which probably does let air in for the water heater.  It also lets in a lot of light.  So I got another set of the one way flaps to go on the inside of that duct….but need a bit more duct to get them installed still.  I also added a new threshold at the base of the door for that room which probably seals the light leaks sufficiently that I won’t need the flaps after all.  Have to wait and see.

The “new” cabinet I fixed up with some hardboard on the back and pine stringers across the top (the original ones were badly warped) which stregthened it up a LOT!  It went from barely able to support it’s own weight to something I would stand on.  The toe kick wasn’t necessary for the height we wanted but I did have to shim out the one corner to make up for it:

Height shim on cabinet.

Yeah, we probably should have painted the bottom as well….but it will be ok for now.  After that I screwed our chunk of counter top to it and we now have a very stable and sturdy cabinet for darkroom supplies, I do have to scrape the paint off the hinges still:

Cabinet Installed!

I still need to trim the shims I used to level it…but hey at least I did level it!

Finally I made one more upgrade to the laundry room / dining room door to seal some final light leaks there:

I still have to paint it but it seems to block out the last of the light leaks quite effectively!  Oh yeah, we also put one of the safelight bulbs we acquired the past few days into one of the fixtures in the dining room so we have a semi-dark antechamber before entering the real dark room.  The dining room much like the laundry room has more lights than make sense for such a small room.  There’s a “normal” overhead fixture that we never use.  A track light which we never use (where we put the safe bulb) and a big skylight that has a flourscent light in it with a stained glass design under it – which is the light we tend to use the most since it gives the most usable light, makes the stained glass look nice, and lights up our backyard Ficus tree nicely giving some gentle light near the back door so we don’t stub so many toes!

Wow!  What a weekend!  I’m exhausted!  But I’m still going to go try and do a few quick prints tonight to celebrate having the darkroom pretty much “done” and fully usable complete with nice safelights now!

Oh yeah, that’s one last thing I forgot to mention.  The back bedroom was wired kind of odd.  Most of the outlets were half always live and half switched by switches on the wall above them.  I took advantage of that with setting up our safelights.  2 of the switched outlets now control safelights so they’re on wall switches, and the 3rd switched outlet is where I plugged in the extension cord for the vent fan…so it’s on a switch as well.  This winter when I rewire this part of the house the fan will get it’s own switch in the laundry room – but for now at least it has a switch!

It happened again.

Read on for more details, more photos, and something completely different.

So yeah, last night we had a bit of a storm blow through.  44MPH gusts I was told.  we knew the tarp was going to need replacement soon, its color was fading quick.  But I really thought it had one or two more storms in it still.  Based on where it tore I’m guessing the two small holes were enough to seed it’s destruction.  The TV antenna had fallen a few weeks ago in a wind storm.  I knew it was going to go since the wood is real soft on the side of the house there and the biggest screws I had didn’t seem quite big enough to hold it.  Need to get some good lag bolts and maybe a bit of epoxy to stregthen the old wood there as well before I put it back up.  It did move in the storm last night but I suspect that was more due to the tarp pulling it around than it tearing up the tarp.

Torn and shredded

Other view

Long view

On the plus side the cheap tarp we put up to replace the last torn original tarp held up just great.  But when I went up to the store we got that one at today the price had jumped from $37 to $50   And they can’t blame gas prices either since it looks like it has been sitting on the shelf since we bought that last one.  They only have one left though so I guess I should bite the bullet and go buy it.  Their tarp selection was much more limited this time than last despite the higher prices.

The storm also took out my new flag which I didn’t have time to take down first

Twisted 90 degrees and mangled.

Up is actually to the left in this photo…I forgot to rotate it before uploading and it appears the gallery in wordpress won’t let me rotate   The wind was strong enough to crack the wood and pull the screws out as well as mangle and bend the metal flag mount.

Up is up in this one.

There we go, with up facing up in this photo it’s a little more obvious what the damage was like.  I noticed nicer heavy cast flat mounts at Walmart the other day so I’ll probably get one of those as a replacement.  May have to get a friend with a welder help me make something a bit sturdier than my wooden insert though.

At least the light still works!

Now, as promised something completely different:

Softrock+Xtall v6.3 RX/TX

Backside, the Si570 is the silver chip near the center.

This is my latest little electronics project.  It’s a SoftRock+Xtall v6.3 created by Tony Parks KB9YIG.  It’s a software definced all band amateur radio receiver and 1 watt transmitter.  It’s only partly constructed in this photo…I’ll have finished photos up by the end of the weekend I hope.  The small daughter board is one of the 4 RX filter modules that have to be changed for various bands.  It comes with modules for 160m , 40/80m, 30/20/15m and the final for 15/12/10m.  Pictured is the 40/80 filter.   I probably won’t bother to bulid the 160m filter since I have no antenna for that band and no plans for one.  I build the 40/80 first since I the 30/20/15 and 15/12/10 modules are the ones I care most about so I figured I’d do the one I don’t care about first for practice.

Yes, I do already have 3 other softrock RX/TX kits and a couple of RX only kits.  I have the original 3 board stack that upgraded a v6.1 for 40/80m and a v6.2 for 20m that is still waiting for me to wind the last 7 inductors (and has been waiting nearly a year…I need to finish that.)  What makes this new one so much nifitier though is that little silver chip on the bottom – the Si570.  The Si570 is a programmable oscilator that gives this version of the SR full frequency agility.  Instead of being locked to 48khz on either side of the crystal this one can be tuned just about anywhere in the HF bands I could want.  It could theoretically even get up to 6m and possibly even 2m – but the switches that make up the mixer in the SR wouldn’t work at those frequencies so other methods would have to be employed.

The other reason I built the 40/80m RX filter first is that the kit only ships with the 40/80m TX PA and Filter.  The other PAF kits are still being tested to make sure they meet FCC requirements but should ship soon.  I’m also anxiously awaiting the new USB kit which I’ve pre-ordered.

You see, while the Si570 is programable there was no connection to the computer to command it in the v6.3 design.  Instead there’s a small microcontroller (a pic to be exact) right next to the 4 dip switches.  The 4 switches can be changed aroudn to select 1 of 16 different frequencies that the pic will command the Si570 to hold.  The USB kit will replace the pic microconroller with another small daughterboard which provides an i2c bus allowing a USB connection to the PC to command the Si570 giving full tuning ability.  The USB kit also gives a serial port which can be used to control the PTT line making hooking the SR to the computer much simpler.  You still need stereo audio in/out for the SR as well as audio out and mic in (necessitating either two sound cards or a 4 channel card like the Delta 44 I recently gave my dad due to the lack of 64bit Vista drivers) but overall the connections to the computer become much simpler and you get better frequency control.

I still have to finish assembling the PAF board and tuning this setup….so that’s on deck for this weekend.  Not a big hurry though since I’m holding out for the 20m PAF and the USB kit which should be here sometime in September.

So rather than write them off I moved them to our far back patio.  That’s where I setup the dartboard for parties, and the rest of the time it’s a nice secluded and quiet part of the yard.  The soft glow of the solar lights worked well out there.

And they did seem to work quite well for a few months.  Yeah, they weren’t all that bright…but that’s not because they didn’t charge well.  They were just cheap lights.  However a month or so ago once the summer sun really started to do it’s job I noticed that instead of lasting longer through the night the lights actually seemed to be having bigger problems – some had stopped coming on at all.  Assuming that the cheap nicad batteries in them had failed I brought one in and checked it out.  Nope, good full charge on on the battery…in fact a little higher than I normally would have expected from a nicad.   Checked the output of the charge circuit and it looked good too.

Doing any more digging would require disassembly of the light so I left it in my office, with the solar cell down against my desk until I could be bothered to go out into the oven, er I mean shed, and get the right sized screwdriver to disassemble it.  So there it sat for a week…or three…ok maybe a month.

Then a day or two I noticed something unusual.  When I shut off the lights in my office that day the light came on!  It didn’t do it again after that…but I assumed by then the battery had to be low, when I checked it today sure enough it was almost dead.  So I took the light back outside this afternoon and shoved it back into the ground.

I just went out and checked…and sure enough it’s working again!  Though it seems even more of the ones that had been working previously are now dark.

My theory is they’re simply getting TOO MUCH sun.  The batteries are getting overcharged and somehow preventing the circuit from kicking into drain mode at night.  I figure tomorrow I’ll round them all up and bring them to the dark for a few weeks for the batteries to drain then put them back out to start fresh.

I had been warned that it was possible to fry solar panels out here due to our overly abundant daylight…but figured these were out of the direct sun enough to deal with it.  I guess not.  Maybe more expensive solar lights would have smarter charge/drain circuity and could deal with it more gracefully.  But I guess until I can afford such lights I’ll just have to take these into the dark for a week or so every month until fall or winter.

And one of these days I still want to get some real panels up on our RV shade with a bank of batteries in the utility area behind my office.  I figure I could put the pump for our drinking water tank, the outside landscape lights, and my radios – maybe even some of my computer stuff on solar since they all run on 12v.  Just have to keep my eyes open for some deals, it’s not uncommon to find some older technology solar panels when snowbirds upgrade their RV’s.  And with sun like this I don’t need the newest most efficient panels to keep things topped up!

Since it was still blowing while I took those it was hard to time it when the full extent of the tear was possible. Thursday evening I ended forgetting to take

any pictures before taking down the remains. At the time these photos were taken it was torn past the first seam visible, shortly after they were taken it tore past the second seam visible – just before the top. Had it stopped there I could have patched up an half cover that would look like it was done on purpose. But the winds would have nothing with that and continued to tear it past the peak and the next seam.

I borrowed Rich’s 16′ ladder to try and get it down…and it just grazed the top. So apparently the top of my arch is right about 16′. Just for the record the width is 177″ (Just over 14′) and althought I’ve measured it I’ve already forgotten what the height to the bottom of the tarp is. The tarp sections are 20′ long so it’s a 40′ long canopy. I’m recording it here so I’ll be able to remember it later! I have to measure the tattered remains to find out how wide of a tarp he used…I suspect it’s a 20′ x 20′ but I have no idea what that curve is and I’m not about to try and calculate what size tarp I should need when there’s a chunk the full length that I can just measure.

After riches ladder didn’t reach I thought about calling Mark to see if he could bring by his scissors lift … but as I pulled Amy’s truck in I noticed that it looked like I may be able to reach the top if I just stood on her truck cab. We’ve used the roof of Matt’s suburban to support a couch and 4 people many times in the dunes and at the sand drags. And I’ve had 2 people relax on the top of my old Ramcharger in similar situations. Before I got a ladder I ofen used my Ramcharger or Amy’s truck to access the roof of the house we lived in previously…so I’m pretty comfortable with working from the roof of a truck.

Amy wasn’t quite so comfortable with it. Even with the truck moving beneeth me I felt more stable than on a rock solid ladder…but Amy was afraid to move the truck with me up there, even when I was on my hands and knees. The working height was perfect though. On my feet I was able to easily reach the entire structure…but not hit my head on any of it. The width of the truck meant we had to make two passes since one side was tied too high to reach from the ground – but otherwise it was super quick and easy.

It’s looking like a new tarp won’t be too bad. I’m just still researching materials and debating the various options available.