Hi everybody and welcome to another
video episode of Bernardo's Tech Blog.
Today I'm starting what should be an interesting project of turning this satellite dish
into a parabolic solar cooker.
In this video I'll be concentrating on
showing you the conversion process and then in later videos I'll be showing you
some of the food you can cook with a parabolic solar cooker like this.
So feel free to subscribe to our channel so you don't miss those future episodes.
All right, to start with I'll remove some of the stuff that we don't need.
Obviously I don't need the electronics here, and I won't need the cable.
I'm also going to reorient some of the mounting hardware here.
What i'd like to do mount this on some sort of a base - maybe a board
or something like that so I can store it in the shed and then I can just take it out
plop it down on the sidewalk or something when I want to do some solar cooking.
and then lastly I am going to change out this nut to a wing-nut
because this is the angle adjustment and I will need to change the angle depending
on the height of the sun in the sky when I do some cooking.
All right, as you can see I'm making a little progress here
I have a couple of boards that I used to make a base.
I also was able to change the mount in such a way that I could flip the dish over
and I did that because I think this will be useful
on the top - perhaps I can
rig something up that I hang the cooking vessle right in the focal point
using this.
So I flipped it over
I also put wing nuts here so I can adjust this however I need to depending
on the angle of the sun.
Here in Pennsylvania in June at midday the sun is almost directly
overhead.
But later in the year or
obviously later in the afternoon I can adjust it down
so I can get a good shot at the sun even if it is close to the horizon.
Now the next thing I need to do is add a reflective surface to this
and I think to do this I am going to go ahead and take if off the mount.
That'll make it a little easier to work with
what I am probably going to do first is to sand it down - it
is a little bit rough
and I think I'd like to sand it down and maybe put a coat of gloss paint or
something like that it to
make sure it is completely smooth.
And then I'm going see if I can find some
reflective mylar or soemthing like that
on the Internet that I can buy and
coat this so it's really
reflective. And then
we should be ready to give it a try.
All right I have this sanded and painted
black so it's nice and smooth now.
I got a little extra paint on and it ran a couple places but I sanded that down
and I think I'm gonna just leave it the way it is - I could put another coat on
but it's pretty smooth and I think the tape
will stick just fine.
Here comes the challenging part:
What I have here is some vinyl
chrome tape that I got on eBay.
I got a 50 foot roll for around $10. It is two inches wide
so it should be plenty of tape to go all the way across here.
I'm gonna start with one strip right down the middle and then I'm going to put
overlapping strips out to the side.
Hopefully I can do without getting too many wrinkles so I have a really good
focal point.
All right I have the second strip and I'm going to put it right along the other one
and just overlap it a little bit.
Here's where I suspect it might get a little tricky because of the curvature of the dish.
I might get some crinkles
in it, and if I do I'll try to get them smoothed out.
One thing I'm noticing in hindsight is that
every little bumb and rough spot on the dish shows up through this tape.
So if I had it to do over again I would probably take more care with
sanding and painting it.
I didn't really see it as that important but I do see the reason now why
it should be very very smooth. So that's just a word of advice to those of you
might give this a try.
What I do at the edges is to just trim
it off so I have about 1/2 or 3/4 of an inch overlapping
and then I just fold it down.
There will be a few crinkles there and a few overlaps but
that's not really important because
that isn't the part of the dish that is reflecting the sun anyway.
All right I have it mounted back in the base and I'm ready to give it a try.
The forecast is calling for a couple of cloudy days so I'm going to post this video
just showing the construction.
Just stay tuned to my channel here and I'll release another video in the coming days
that shows the capabilities of this.