Filed under Our Shop
Building a chocolate shop: progress, electrics, mold
Construction projects seem to go in spurts. We spend lots of time planning, waiting for ordered supplies, waiting for subs to show up, waiting for approvals, and generally worrying about how slowly things are going. Then it seems like everything is happening at once. This is a happening-at-once week.
Electricians, plumbers and tinners.
Our electricians have been busy running conduit for the various pieces of gear we’re going to install. We laid out exact locations for each machine or system, tracked down voltages and loads, and generally did whatever we could to make sure we won’t have to redo wires later. In this shot, you can see our electricians, Gary and Mark in the background, running conduit for the depositor and enrober, and the guys from Air Mechanical hanging our furnace/AC unit. The furnace will be suspended over our chocolate cooler.
One fun project for the week was hanging a transformer for our vacuum mixer. The mixer is a 440 volt monster, up until now hidden away in storage in a Cadbury R&D lab. to run it, we’ve gotten a step-up transformer to convert from the 208 volt 3-phase service in the shop to the 440 volts it needs. The question we’ve had is where to put the transformer. We don’t want to give up floor space for it, and it needs to be near the rear electrical box, as the supply to the transformer uses much heavier (read “expensive”) wire than the 440-volt output side, and we want to keep those wires short.
We discussed bolting the transformer to the wall above the breaker box or building a shelf for it, but the easy solution our team hit upon was hanging the transformer from threaded rod bolted to the flanges of the bar joists that support the roof. The transformer already had a base made from steel angle iron, and some holes in the corner of the steel frame made for a convenient way to hang it. In this sequence, Len, Gary and Mark lift the transformer on a small hand-cranked lift, line it up on the all-thread rods, and fasten it in place.
Garagedoorectomy
We’re tight on floor space. The plan we put together allows us to reconfigure the working space for multiple production tasks, and shoehorns bulky pieces of machinery into a mostly workable arrangement. The real estate we started with has an overhead 10′x10′ garage door in the rear, which is a good thing for deliveries and access. The bad news is that the rails for an overhead door make it almost impossible to seal the space under the door when it’s in the rolled-up position. The health department would insist we seal off the space under the door from the rest of the shop, and would not let us use that space for food storage. The solution is to replace the overhead door with an exterior roll-up door. Putting a plastic strip curtain across the door opening, behind the roll-up door, lets us use the entire area for food storage. In this snapshot, the new roll-up door is in place, but the old overhead door hasn’t been removed yet.
Leaky drain problems, and a nasty surprise
Our roof is flat, sloping to the north for drainage, and has a gutter running along the north side, drained by multiple down pipes embedded in the north wall of the building. We had a strong rain this week, and discovered that the down pipe at the rear of our space wasn’t well connected to the gutter and the underground drains at the bottom of the pipe were clogged.
The result was water, lots of water, running down the outside of the drain pipe and flooding the rear of our space. We fixed the upper connection, and our landlord is cleaning out the piping at the bottom of the drain so it won’t back up any more. The bad news is that this has been happening for a while. We pulled apart the wall around the pipe, and discovered lovely black mold under all the drywall. The solution is pulling down all the affected drywall and insulation and replacing it.
Here’s a snapshot of the entire drain pipe, after we got done cleaning it up. The good news is that our landlord will pay for the new drywall.
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