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8:56pm - Is it ever going to stop raining? I think it has been raining for 2 months now. It is totally interfering with my ability to work on my backyard project, a.k.a. the shuttlecraft.

I had to drive my car today since Leslie had to work late and I also had to go by Driven automotive this morning and work on their computer systems for a couple of hours. The interesting thing is, I told shannon, the owner, about my leak. He pulled my car in and took the rear all apart in amazing time. He knew right where every piece came apart. Anyway, he said he couldn't really see anything that showed signs of leaking, like a rust trail or anything. So he put it all back together and put new sealant on all the parts. Well, it rained the rest of the day on my car and it rained hard. I checked it when I got home and there was only about a spoonfull of water under the spare tire. It appears that whatever he did cured about 90% of the problem.

It is very annoying having to wait so long to finish the frame on my shuttlecraft so that I can move onto the interior and electronics aspect. However, the benefit of doing so is that I'm constantly thinking about how I'm going to make those parts and I keep thinking up better ideas. So if I had finished it last month then I would have done certain things either not as good or more expensive than need be. Yesterday I had a wonderfull stroke of luck. I've been pondering for weeks on exactly what to use as a power system. After all, I want most everything to run off of 12 Volts DC. I also thought it would be great to have it run from battery, especially until I get a trench dug to run an A/C power line to it from the house. But I couldn't figure out a very good way of charging the battery or even figure out what kind of battery to use. Well, yesterday somebody returned a UPS (Uninteruptable Power Supply) to our store saying it was defective. Well, as with about 95% of merchandise that is "supposedly" defective, it worked fine. It was a brand-new APC unit, which is one of the most popular models available. I noticed it had a door on the bottom that you could open up to replace the battery. I was curious and opened it and found that it runs off of a 12 Volt Lead-acid battery about the size of a soda-can, only it is rectangular instead of round. I decided to put it to the test so I took one of the little fluorescent computer-case lights that I'm considering using for lighting inside my shuttlecraft and connected the leads directly to the battery terminals. It lit up as expected so I decided to set my stopwatch and see how long it goes. I only expected it to run for a few hours. However, it was still going when I left work yesterday evening and it was even still going when I got to work this morning. In fact, it was stil going when I left work again. So my stopwatch was at a little over 30 hours last time I saw it going. So I added up the amps for all the 12V items I plan on installing in the shuttlecraft and figured it all up based upon the amp-hours listed on the battery.. all things considered that one little battery should be able to run my shuttle with every single device turned on for several hours. I could always add additional batteries in parallel to get longer life. Those batteries are only about $12 a piece. The great thing is, using the circuit board out of a UPS I can also have 120V A/C plugs in the shuttle and also have its own charging circuit. We have about 70 of those little units at the store that are used that we sell for $19 a piece. So I think I've definatly found what to use for my power system.

Of course, it will have to stop raining some time in order for me to do any of this.