ToasterWaffles

After all the fabrication for the tank today I was feeling very macho and decided to do something about my dust cap situation. See, for a regular yoke style tank you can buy dust caps anywhere: they’re just a cheap piece of plastic. But for DIN valves you need special screws, with proper threads and everything. That costs money, making these screws $9 - $22 (plastic vs. stainless steel). My solution costs about $0.96 + 5 minutes.

I have no intentions of paying $9 for a cap to remind me if a tank is empty or not. Sure, the stainless steel screws can keep all your gas from leaking out if the valve gets turned, but I dive air and don’t care. If I were diving with expensive helium tri-mix, I might. Like I said, I just need to know which are full and which aren’t.

To that end I saw some old 1“ PVC caps lying around and thought ”Gee, I bet those will fit.“ They fit like a freaking glove. But they won’t stay on by themselves. So out came the Dremel and a few seconds later I had two holes. I snipped a rubber band and put one end through each hole, tied some knots, and pulled it taught.

Viola! Instant dust cap for less than $1.00!

Our first day of fabrication was fraught with set-backs. But, we worked hard and got through to make some decent progress: measuring. We also bought a wicked saw!

The first clue today could be rough was when we got to Kurt & Marla (Jess’ parents) house and saw that her dad wasn’t home. He was supposed to help us with the design a little and suggest some different joints to use.

Since we thought he might get back home in a reasonable time I left Jess there and went back home to get all the tools. By the time I got back he hadn’t shown up, but Jess had some ideas. We discussed modifying the design to use 2×6’s for the supports and top rails instead of 4×4’s, and using 2×4’s on the bottom to keep the legs from splaying out. Once she showed me the plans and how much simpler it’d be to assemble I was pretty sold. She also showed me (later) the stand she got this idea from.

She’d also had another idea: we need a saw.

So we went off to HomeDepot to see about getting a saw, some lumber, and general construction junk. We exited with: 7 lengths of 2×6, 3 lengths of 2×4, 2 boxes of deck screws, some Liquid Nail, a “T” square, and some safety goggles. Oh, and we bought a nice radial saw too! This thing should be quite nice and make our fabrication shop just about complete.

My little Civic, Betty, looked quite funny with that much lumber in her as we made the short trip back home. We unloaded everything and I got to measuring while Jess foraged. We ate dinner, measured and marked everything, stacked it all up away from the sprinklers (like the picture) and called it a night.

Tomorrow we may get some fabrication time in, but not much. We’re going to a friends house to talk shop and help get her wireless network working better. Since we’ve triple checked all the measurements we should be able to just fire up the saw when we get home and make some quick cuts. I know it won’t go that easily, but a fella can hope!
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Jess went to the trouble of making a nice image of the tank stand she wants to build. She then sent off the picture to her parents who have a lot of woodworking experience and know how to make it strong enough. Everything except the bottom four pieces in the picture are 2×6“ lengths. The bottom four (that keep the supports from splaying out) are standard 2×4’s.