One reason for not doing more projects is the necessity to visit
relatives. Fortunately the lovely Jackie is half Italian, so she has
cousins to visit in Italy. One such cousin (Elena) very kindly let
us stay in the house her which father Nello (now deceased) built. He was a
mining engineer, and the house features a workshop underneath. I
particularly liked that the entrance to the workshop from inside the
house is down a marble staircase from the hall – classy!
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| Marble steps to the workshop (Carlo Scarpa style) |
Once down there, the workshop area has several rooms, the largest
part being about 15m long and 5m wide. I had major workshop envy.
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| The main workshop vista |
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| Lathe corner. That's quite some lathe under there! |
But the piece de resistance, project-wise, is a concentrated solar
water heating system which features a massive mirror array on a
steerable mount, focussing the sun’s rays onto a blackened copper
water coil, fed through its supporting pipes and conveying the heat
back to a water tank in the workshop.
I’m not quite sure how the
steering system was supposed to work; I couldn’t see anything to
sense which way to turn the array, but the motors and mechanisms were
all in place. To be fair, this system wasn’t a home build, but a
commercial product, as you can see from the back view.
Nevertheless,
it’s a monumental thing to install in the garden, and a grand ambition.
Sad to say, the whole thing was a bit of a flop – the tank turned out to be
too small, and couldn’t sink enough heat; the concentrator coil
boiled and ruptured, and the whole thing was a victim of its own
effectiveness. By this time the old man was quite old, and he never
repaired it, so now it stands as a decaying monument to marvellous
ambition, thwarted by drab reality. At least it went out with a
bang, though.
