Monthly Archives: August 2020

New lab!

By   August 28, 2020

The whole Covid-pocalypse thing has expedited our move to DebtRidge.  It was a temporary move and we’re mulling whether to make it more permanent, or at least, invert the weighting on where our possessions are located.

This created a new problem; not enough room for me to do my ‘lab’ type stuff.  The 28’x36′ shop is great for big dirty work (welding, grinding, sawing, transmission rebuilds, etc) but not so good for hot air rework, 3D printing, etc.

Here’s what I had to do for 3D printing in the meantime:

Oddly enough, one of the companies I work for had a portable building previously used by CATSA as a Portable Screening Unit (xray, walkthrough metal detectors, preflight security) and it was just sitting there doing nothing.  This portable building was able to collapse to a size barely legal for road transport, was able to lift itself up high enough for a truck to back a trailer under it, and has a 20kW generator!

After a couple of years of sporadic but persistent querying on my part, finally I was given approval to buy this building from my customer.  Now I had a new problem:  Where to put it.

A bit of excavation and compacting later and here we have it:

The next problem was transport.  It took 2 months of research until I arrived at something cost effective and reasonably possible. To spare the details, the end result is I paid to have it trucked to the road in front of the driveway, and then had 2 friends come over to back it down the driveway on a trailer I rented in Sundre.

Loaded and on the way to DebtRidge

In front of the driveway.

Ready to lower onto the rental trailer

Not much room to spare

On the pad just after removing trailer. Standing on 3 legs.

Powered up and expanded

20kW diesel generator!

Initial layout.

I have lots more stuff to put in and set up but at least it’s functional now.