Do It Yourself : Desert Cooler - 2

Click Rebuilding Desert Cooler  for all related posts.

What you saw in last post here was something that needed some work to fix. I came to know today that the cooler was like 8 years old! For that old piece of equipment, it is a great bargain if it gets up and running in a couple of K bucks!

But first things first. Got to plan!

So many days before I used my first tool on that junk, I had a background process running in my head all the time thinking how-tos of everything I need to fix in there.

So after a rough plan, I made out a list of material I would be needing and reserved a day for shopping for stuff in the hardware market. The list read something like:
 - Coarse  grain sandpaper
 - Fine grain sandpaper
 - Wire brush
 - Red oxide primer
 - PVC Conduit pipes
 - Lubricating oil
 - Turpentine oil
 - 3/4 inch hose
 - 4 ft x 1 ft steel wire mesh
 - Insulation tape
 - Water pump
 - Plastic gardening mesh
 - Fan brackets
 - Wiring for fan and pump
 - Paint
 - Wood shavings wool

etc etc

Some things that I figured out will be useful on the fly like this little fellow:

This is a wood workers grinding wheel made of layers of sandpaper. It can be mounted on to a (my dad's) hand-held grinder. I thought might be useful in some cases. And did it help!

So spent a few hours shopping and I came home with a couple of bags of stuff. The whole stuff cost me less than a couple of thousand rupees and that includes some new tools as well (see that yellow handled cutter in the pic?). I find that pretty fair. How about you?

My family members were not surprised as they knew I am up to something or the other all the time! :-)

The most painful task was now. Cleaning it up and preparing for assembly. That included:
 - Sanding the rust and flaking paint off
 - Cleaning
 - Priming
 - Painting


To my surprise that task was more tedious that I thought it would be. Especially when you are starting from something like this:

Ewww!

My shopping basket had sandpaper to start with but sandpapering proved less effective than scraping the flaking paint off with a used Hack-Saw blade. So this is how it was done:

1. Scrape off the paint

 2. Wipe and clean

 3. Sand off the specks of paint. Its easy because small spots are now very vulnerable

4. As good as new! Paint can protect galvanized metal over 8 years!!

That was the water reservoir by the way. 

The cleaning took much of my weekend (almost all). Now I am waiting to steal some time every now and then to act on my remaining stuff.. These days the thing is undergoing more cleaning and painting and going really well. But more on that later.

Let me know if you like the verbosity of this post.

Good night!