back to Mark-2 solar frame design

construction:


I was hoping to be able to re-use the hardware from the original frame, and it occurred to me that I could just
cut the frame down the middle and put on new sides, to create two smaller frames from the one larger frame. It
won't require too much additional material, and should have a number of advantages over the original design.
There won't be an unsupported area in the middle to sag, the frame will only need to support half the weight,
they can be transportable fully-assembled, and they can be taken in and out of a door without disassembly.

At this time I already had plans to get more panels, so after splitting the original frame I bought more sticks
and built two more of the new narrow frames to accomodate another set of 8 panels. I also switched out the
wing nuts for locking nylon nuts, since this design won't need to be taken apart, and those wing nuts tended
to snag on things. I had to use a file to shave down the ends of the sticks to get them to easily fit into
the channel of the larger sticks. From there I just drilled a single hole and connected them with 1" or 1.25"
bolts and the nylon lock nuts.

When considering the spacing of the horizontals, I took into account that the top panel would be recessed into
the channel of the stick it hung from, and that there would be a little overlap with the panel it connected to
below it, with the goal of only having about a half an inch distance from the stick below the lower panel. This
allows me to tie the 2nd panel and 3rd panel using the same wire tie, while maximizing the size of the bottom
gap that gets the lowest panel as far off the ground (and away from the grass or snow) as possible.


materials

A solar frame sticks	B spacing for panels	C bottom	D bottom	E lower	F middle
G top	H top	I six frames complete

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