We have fluorescent lights and incandescent lights. The incandescent lights are old-school automotive lights that just make you depressed about how much power they’re taking and how little light they’re producing. I’m determined to replace them with LEDs. I’m determined to replace the fluorescent with LEDs too, but so far I am incapable of finding any LED tube lights of the appropriate length.
I started the day by exploring what was above the incandescent enclosure. If you’ve ever looked in the walls of an RV you know it can be a scary place. This was beautifully clean and tidy. Even better, it answered the question of why the antennas are where they are! They’re all above the lights. When I showed this to Dachary she pointed out that this means we can run the solar cables through one of the unused antenna holes, after widening it a bit.
what lives above the lights
As a bonus, the antenna wires, like all the other wires, are clearly labeled. This is number 2. Alas, I have no idea where the other end of some of them are, but now when I find another single wire line labeled 2 I know what it is.
After taking some measurement’s I went and ordered some LED replacements. We’ll repurpose the little wiring harness for them so that we can easily remove them if we need to.
Dachary started the day with a serious headache, and after that discovery it was clear she was going to be unable to help much with the build. I asked her to sanity check my measurements on the sink hole before she went back inside to stop making her head throb.
That left me with the sink hole, and the dreaded Dremel drill saw. The blade fell out twice. I ended up having to use pliers to screw the collet down hard enough to keep it in place. After learning that on the test piece I moved on to the real thing. There I learned that the stupid circular cut accessory ALSO needs to be clamped down unreasonably tight or else it slowly decreases the radius of your cut. Joy!
This meant there was no way the cutting board would ever fit inside the hole cleanly. I had to cut away so much extra wood to compensate for the imprecision of the Dremel cuts. I cut. I sanded. I cut more. I sanded more. I got the big board into a reasonable state of being, but I still need to sand the concave corners, and that required another trip to Home Depot (quelle surprise?!), which we eventually made.
I spent the rest of the afternoon cleaning up the cutting board, cleaning the workspace for the next round of work, and cooking. I’m sad the cutting board won’t fit as nicely as I want. The hole is too big front to back so there’s still debate if we’ll have the sink under the hole or on top of the counter. We’ll see after we route out the grooves that will let us set it in place.
a sink hole and cutting board
The gap you see under the hole there is artificial until we route the grooves.
That was yesterday. Routing the grooves was today’s project. In order to do that we needed to build a jig for routing, which we did. We then discovered we’d used a piece of MDF that was too thin, so the router hits the piano hinge that is the key to the jig. There’s also an extra 1/16" (damn imperial measurements!) that got introduced, but we don’t know where / how yet.
We’ve decided to say “fuck it”. This is for the underside of the counter and being off by a small amount isn’t a big deal with these cuts. We just need to compensate for the width of the hinge and the extra 1/16" when we place the jig.
With regards to the Ambulance, that was all we accomplished today, other than the inevitable trip to Home Depot for sanding sponges, screws, and something I’ve forgotten. “Life” managed to take up the rest of the day: grocery shopping, a trip to the vet for more flea, tick, and heart-worm medication, cooking, and giving out candy to small children (and large ones) in the evening.
