 All right, something's been bugging me. I've got this situation where I've got this sail that's going to have solar panels all over it. It goes up there to the best, and the wind blows it. Sounds great, right? There are a few issues that have been bugging me while I've been building this thing. One is that this thing, this sail, goes the width of the boat, and that means anytime I'm going into a place where there are either posts beside a dock or into a canal with mangroves or something, I'm risking hitting the edges of this. And this is going to have expensive solar panels on it that I'm not going to be able to replace. Like the only reason I'm going to have these solar panels is because this company Solbion is sponsoring me and gave them, well, sold them to me at a massive discount. I'm not going to be able to replace these if they get damaged. Another thing is I want to cover them when I'm not using them because they're the lightweight plastic coated solar panels. They still last like seven years. However, if you keep them covered when you're not using them, they last significantly longer. So there's disadvantages and advantages of the lightweight solar panels. I really want the lightweight ones for a vehicle for obvious reasons. And I'm not driving the vehicle most of the time, so I can just cover them. Now covering this thing, it's like almost three meters across. So I'm like this tall, and I have to get something all the way across this thing. And it's sometimes windy. And if I'm like rolling something out over this and wind, I mean, yeah, I can get the wind going this way. Okay. Fine. Even then it's going to be a pain in the butt. Another thing is I'm not going to be able to stand on the boat ever because this is going to be like a meter and a half, four foot, I know it's going to be low enough that I can't stand on the boat. Now I will be able to tilt this, which means if I tilt it, I'll be able to stand under one side. However, I'm still going to have to be super careful about loading and unloading because, you know, hitting this, and this is a work plan, you know, this thing is just giant and cumbersome. And I'm going to be so nervous about flipping this huge sail up that has all these solar panels on it for fear of some high wind gusts coming and ripping the thing off, which probably won't happen. But I'm going to be nervous about that anyway. Also it's just like a giant wing, you know, even when it's down, if I'm in a situation with high winds, which I almost never will be because I don't go out in stores, but occasionally it's going to happen. Sometime I'm going to get caught in a storm. There's going to be high winds coming. This is going to create tons of lift. It may capsize the boat or even just rip off like 40, 50 mile an hour wind with a thing this big, it's going to, it's going to cause a lot of force. Another thing is it's got fairly significant wind resistance just because it's got all these flanges along it, right along the bottom. So going to the water when I'm going forward, it's going to have a lot of wind resistance which probably won't be a problem when I'm motoring. However, if I'm in the dark or whatever and I'm pedaling, you know, and I have a bad headwind, it may be a problem. Anyway, there are all these issues and they're going to be real problems when I'm using the thing. So this morning when I woke up, I just laid in bed and started thinking. Also getting the sail up and down is going to be kind of, I don't know. Anyway, all these issues, I haven't been able to come up with a solution for these things while I've been working on the thing. So this morning I said, all right, Brain, just forget everything you're doing right now. Just pretend you're designing this thing from scratch. What would you do? And the first thing I thought was, well, what if I don't use that sail? What'll I do with it? Oh, it'll be an awesome shade cover. I can make a gazebo out of it. It'll definitely get some use. It's okay. Don't worry about what I've built so far. Just think of what will be the best thing. And I'm not going to go through all that crap I went through to get here. This is what I came up with. It took me a while to come up with this because if I change the solar panels to this orientation, they don't actually fit on the boat. They stick out past the edges. The original way to do it was to have them like this. This is totally not to scale. But this is actually in real life a shorter distance than this because these aren't that long. Anyway, so this sticks out past the edge of the boat if the solar panels are like this, which is only a problem when I'm at a dock or going through somewhere that's skinny or whatever. So what if I mount the solar panels like that? And this happens to solve all of the problems. It takes away the sail option. However, I think keeping the sail option was causing more problems than it solves. Otherwise, if I go like this, I have all the standing room here, standing room here, I could put up a sail, a cloth sail pretty easily, but right now I'm just going to figure out the solar panel thing. All right. The way this solves all the problems is I hard mount the middle row of solar panels and there will be two more up in the front there. This is longer than this. So that means these ones are not hinged. They're just locked into place. They're mounted really solid, so they're not going to move, they're not going to rip off or anything. I put a hinge here and a hinge here and I just mount the hinge at the top edge so that these can fold. And the way I do the fiberglass here is I taper it down to thin at this end. So when it goes like that, it's thin here, so this one can fold on top of it. I'll have to make sure the hinge can get around this edge or maybe move it out a little bit or it shouldn't be that hard to figure out. Now doing that is going to be a lot easier than any of the other plans I have for covering the solar panel with sheets and stuff. This way, all the solar surfaces are covered. I just have to make sure this bottom surface is painted well and everything. I don't even need a cloth cover to cover the thing, I just close them up and they're protected. Now the other thing that this does, I mean this fixes so many things. It reduces the wind area, so if I'm just pedaling, I'm not going to have so much wind resistance because this is just going to be basically maybe not totally smooth surface, but it's not going to have those big flanges I needed to accommodate such a wide thing. I'll be able to put much more low profile flanges across here to keep this rigid. Now I think I'm going to have to make these flat, which is fine. Another cool thing this does is say the sun is coming this way, see with the old sail style I was just thinking I tilt the whole thing and that's great, except it's kind of a pain in the butt to tilt something that big and anyway. So this way I just tilt this one and that one toward the sun. So this is hard mounted, it doesn't move, I won't get any extra light on this one, however the other two, there's going to be so many solar panels on this, that's going to make a big difference when the sun's coming in this way. Yeah, when I'm loading and unloading, like one of the big issues I was having was when I get to town, how am I going to get everything onto the boat in a rush when I've got like idiots trying to like help me load and I'm like, no, no, don't touch anything, please don't touch anything. Oh, they broke something. So this way, now I've got this much space on the boat that you can walk on where I can load things more easily and keep people away from my boat. This sounds stupid. Why do you have to keep people, no, seriously, you have to keep people away from your boat if you, they get so touchy and like want to break everything. Oh, what's that boat, it's so interesting, let me touch it and wreck it. Okay, it's just going to make everything a lot easier and then if I'm going through a skinny thing of mangroves or parked up against a dock with a post, yeah, just close those, it's safe. This solves so many problems. I think I have to do that. I'm still, I got to think about it though. There may be a problem with this that I haven't thought of, but it's, in my brain it seems like it's pretty darn good and these are going to be real easy to move up and down because it's just such a small thing, it's not going to weigh very much. I'm not sure if I'm going to want to have this solid the whole length of the thing because it'll be like a 20 foot, like a seven meter long thing that I tilt at once or if I want to break it up into two sections, I think I could probably do it all at once. I don't know, either way this is, I think this is maybe what I want to do is it really protects those solar panels that are by far the most valuable items on the boat. These mounting parts still totally work because that's where the middle row of solar panels mounts, I'll have to put something back here and take out this mast, I can probably use it for some of the parts. Oh here's another kind of minor issue I didn't bring up, but peeing on the boat. It's nice to be able to stand up at the edge of the boat and pee, with the sail it's going to like, yeah, this way you know I'll just be able to tilt one thing up if I need to pee. Or actually the solar panels, since they're going to be wider, they're not going to go right to the front or the back of the boat, I'll still have space to stand up here and go pee while I'm driving, or off the back, oh that's great. So if those are going to be one meter wide, I'm going to have something permanently there that's still leaving me a pretty wide spot to stand, yeah, and that'll be easy to load things and unload things, and I might have the whole solar panel thing put in with a pin and a pin there and one at the back so I could hypothetically remove it if I needed to, although I don't want to make it too easy to get off, maybe I'll just make it permanently attached, because I don't want people to steal it, yeah I'll probably just make it really hard to get off. If I do that, one day when I will inevitably end up in a storm, hopefully no time soon, I can fold up the solar panels, reduce their wind area significantly so they're not lifting the boat out of the water or tearing off or something, and then just, you know, use batteries, motor, pedal, whatever to get to some safe place, and how do I make this thing? It's not that complicated, yeah it's not that hard to make, I need to get some stuff, I need a sheet of plywood, it's not super thick but kind of thick because I'm going to need these things to be real flat when I make them, yeah, so I'm not going to work on this at all today, I'm just going to put it in my brain that this is what I'm doing and think about it and see if any problems come up, and you know all the problems with the last thing were there in my head from the beginning, I was just kind of hoping some ideas would come up that would solve them, and I guess one of the issues was when I came up with the idea for the the sails, I didn't think I was going to be able to cover them all with solar panels, and then I then it became possible and I was like whoa, but yeah, because I can get all the solar panels, they're going to become the more much more useful energy system on the boat, so I'd rather make things more conducive to that than the sails, and yeah like I said before, I'm going to have all that space now when those are full folded up, I could throw up a mask and put up a sail, that's something to worry about later, yeah this shouldn't be that hard to make, well some more resin, I have plenty of fiberglass, oh Dashana's going to be so excited that she's getting that freaking sail as a gazebo shade area, I know I already did a bunch of work on the other thing, however I'm feeling kind of good right now, like I was going down the wrong path and painting myself into a corner, and now I might not be.