Martens Solar

Building the arms was by far the most time-consuming task. If only I had a cnc.... The rim of wood around the bearing was needed but I didn't like the really thick arm, I drew this up in Fusion, printed out the drawing, and stuck it down with a glue stick. The slot in the middle was an idea to make the arms lighter and look cooler. I tried it with one arm and then ditched the idea, it really didn't work and was a lot of work. All cut-out, at this point I didn't have access to a scroll saw so this was all done with a regular handsaw and files. It's pretty rough but I cleaned it up as best I could. Already looking much better. The next step was mass production, I needed 20 arms total. For this, I bought a used Craftsman Scroll saw. It was very, very useful. All cut and drilled out. Removing the paper was annoying, I used the top edge of a file to scrape it off. Since I put it on with a glue stick it wasn't very difficult to scrap...

I started off with by figuring out exactly what the arms would look like. I drew up 3 different arm designs in TinkerCAD and, once again, ended up not using any of them. These were designed to include a short piece of rope wrapping around each end. I wasn't sure how strong the bond between metal and wood would be and I thought maybe a piece of rope slathered with epoxy would add enough strength to the joint. Straight Arm Tapered Arm Rounded Arm I experimented with the last design. I drilled with a larger bit first to make room for the lip the bearing has, then all the way through with a smaller bit. Fits pretty perfectly. I used Kroeger Quik-Cure 5 minute epoxy. It's supposed to have a better bond with both wood and metal compared to their 10 or 15 minute versions. The bond was decent, but with a little sideways force it popped right off. The epoxy needs more surface area to get a strong bond. Back to the drawing boa...

It was at this time that I started to wonder if there was some way I could make a computer model that would allow me to play with the arms, to move them and see them fold and unfold. After looking at a bunch of different CAD softwares and not really seeing what I wanted, I arrived at Fusion 360  from Autodesk. While Fusion seems to be oriented around team development and pushes the cloud-based nature of the program quite hard, it also seemed to be exactly what I needed. This is the part that caught my eye, nevermind that it was an extremely capable CAD software. I would be able to create an arm assembly and then make it move, this was really exciting at the time. To be honest it still is rather exciting to watch the arm assembly move in Fusion just by moving the drive arm. Oh, and it's free. (for hobbyists and students) On to the actual design, since I was extremely excited to try the moving parts feature, I immediately created an approximate model and set about maki...

Now, this is where it gets fun. So far I've just made a pair of very shallow wooden boxes. The idea I came up with had several variations, most of which I've drawn in my notepad, here are the pictures. A very quick sketch to get a rough idea of what I was thinking You can get a pretty decent idea of what I was going for with this picture. The rectangle is the frame/body/housing of the setup, I wasn't sure how that was going to work yet. The solid lines are one position and the dotted lines are another position. Each larger circle represents a joint. The curved line is the hull of the kayak. The idea was to have a folding arm system that could extend and retract the panels, they could extend to give them more clearance from the boat (more on why that's needed later on) and retract to minimize drag in the case of high winds or in the case of the kayak tipping. Many different variations Here I was trying to figure out how the arms would attach to the fra...

Continued from pt. 1 This next bit here was the most difficult thing to do on the bracing, and it wasn't difficult. I made a notch in the very middle of each piece, exactly as wide as the piece. 4 of the pieces had the notch made in the bottom, and the other 4 had the notch in the top. To made the initial border cuts I tested the position of the clamped piece of wood before hand so that the outer edges of the border cuts were as far apart as the piece was wide. Once I had 2 border cuts on each piece I remove the clamped piece and ran the pieces back and forth through the table saw to remove all the wood in the middle. The 2 border cuts Back of the same thing 4 top, 4 bottom They fit! 2 per panel With all the pieces fit together I rounded everything over and glued the opposing halves together. I used the same Titebond wood glue here that I did before. I also cut out some longer, wider pieces to join the X pieces together. These pieces hav...

Building the bracing was a tad more difficult than I had imagined, mostly due to the way I joined the two parts of the X. I started with a scrap piece of 2x4 left over from a previous project. Pine 2x4 Cut to size Holding the piece against a clamped piece of wood gives me the same size every time 8 pieces of approximately the same size Cutting corners! Again! As you can see, the pieces don't all line up with each other. However, this is probably the least crucial part of the entire build so if the dimensions are slightly off it really doesn't make much of a difference.

Continued from pt.1 I started the gluing process with the longest pieces of the lip, gluing them to the back pieces. I use Titebond Original wood glue for everything made from wood. I didn't bother to try and measure them and make 45-degree cuts before gluing them on. It's much easier to cut them after and it accomplishes the exact same thing. Extreme precision isn't needed here. Here they are trimmed to fit, I just used a fine-tooth handsaw and approximated the angle. All the other pieces glued in. This wasn't very difficult, just time-consuming. For the corner pieces, I held a piece in place and made marks where to cut, purposefully cutting them slightly too long. Then I was able to sand them down so they fit perfectly. Next was to add the outer edge, it seems like I forgot to take pictures for the majority of this step, but it's almost identical to adding the lip. The only difference is that I clamped the pieces on slightly differently, rathe...

At this point, I had enough things drawn out that I could start the build process. I started by buying two pieces of 2mm plexiglass from a local glass shop and getting them to cut the pieces to size. Exactly 177mm wide and 678mm long. Tracing is much easier than measuring! I then got a 5'x5' sheet of 1/8" (approximately 3mm) Birch plywood from a local building supply store and traced the plexiglass onto the plywood, this ensured that even if the plexiglass wasn't exactly the right size the two would still fit together. Thankfully I have access to a table saw which makes cutting straight, right angle cuts much easier than with a hand saw. I also have access to a chop saw, which makes angled cuts more accurately than by hand. Cutting Corners! I was able to cut the plywood backs of the housing and the plexiglass with the same set-up. I wasn't sure how the plexiglass would handle being cut with a chop saw but it seemed to be fine. Once I had all...