Filter tipped :-)

It’s been a busy old day here at the north end and I rarely left the workshop for the greatest part of it, so engrossed was I in my latest recycling project. I’d actually done a couple of hours on it last night and didn’t complete it until 16:00, which turned out to be perfect timing.

The day lended  itself perfectly to making a filter for the inlet of my hydro turbine http://www.powerspout.com/ which should now be on its way from New Zealand 🙂 Mist and rain met me as I left the house and looked set for the day, so I was quite happy to potter away converting an old cold water storage tank, some fish cage float off cuts, an old plastic sign and a Land Rover rear disc into a state of the art water filter 🙂 Well it was cutting edge by my standards and the only thing that I had to but was one fitting for the outlet and some stainless steel mesh for the screen

 

I cut the plastic fish cage float into strips to retain the mesh in the tank with stainless screws,

 

used this plastic sign as a base. Cutting a hole in it first and inserting some mesh between it and the Land Rover disc that would sink it and keep it on the bottom. That’s it upside down on the tank.

At which point my boy and his pals arrived to tighten up the twenty countersunk machine screws that held it together 🙂

Once that was done we just had time to take it over to the loch and prepare for sinking it before dinner.

Before depositing it in the loch however I had to remove the gate vale from the low pressure end of the penstock and swap it with the ball valve at the high pressure end. Lack of suitable couplings and pipe had forced me to assemble them this way round to test out my siphon. That was now sorted, and whilst I still did not have the correct fittings, I had come up with a scheme for connecting the pipe.

The fitting I required were 90 to 63 reducers which are normally ‘off the shelf’ items at the very helpful and competitive  http://www.pipestock.com/. Unfortunately they’re made in Italy which closes down for August so they can all drive to Scotland in campervans 🙂 There are other suppliers who have them in stock but I was quoted between £30 and £50 for delivery on two items that would fit in a large shoe box and weighed much less than 8Kg 😦 Why can’t these clowns use Parcelforce for less than a tenner and sell much more stuff to the Highlands and Islands is beyond me.

Anyway, I’d  ‘made do and mend’ courtesy of some 90 to 75 reducers and a 76mm aluminium road sign pipe that I’d scrounged off Willie Eyre, who’d found it on the beach. However as the couplings are plastic and designed to bite into the MDPE pipe to grip it I was reluctant to use it on the HP side.

Consulting my expert 🙂 (no idea who took this picture, I just found it in my camera) I took the metal pipe back to my workshop, figuring that if I shortened it enough I could hold the two couplings together with some chain and a ‘turnbuckle’.

To be honest the joint would have probably held without, my filter is fine enough to stop the odd newt suddenly blocking the turbine jets and causing ‘water hammer’ and a sudden pressure build up, but you never know 🙂

That took us up to a pot roast of Eddy’s neck for dinner after which we returned to swap the valves and fit the filter in the loch.

I would have liked to have got water through it but the day was failing fast and I didn’t want to rush the job.

Though we did at least get the filter in 🙂