Solar on a Shoestring: Mother's Amazing Fin Press

(Page 2 of 2)

January/February 1980
By the Mother Earth News staff 
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HOW TO MAKE AND ATTACH TIN FINS

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To turn free soup or soda cans into solar collector fins, just cut both the lids and the end rims off your scrounged cylinders with an electric—or manually-cranked, wall-fastened—can opener (hold the tins in a horizontal, rather than vertical, position when you do this). Then—using steel wool or a propane torch —buff or bum off the metal's protective coating. Cut each can down the middle, trim the sheet to a flat 5-1/2" X 6" shape ... and press it.

When you're ready to secure a fin to some pipe, just lay the shaped tin on two fireproof boards (or blocks, or bricks) placed side by side with a pipe width's space between them. Nestle the fin's curved center section into the gap, set your collector pipe into position, hold It in place with any heavy nonflammable —weight (to increase sheet-to-pipe contact), and solder the two metals together. Add more fins to your pipe—by laying out the grooved sheets, weighting, and soldering—until you've completed your platemaking ... then buff off any extra flux along the length of the pipe.

When all that's done, you'll have finished a crucial (and often the most expensive) step of your home-designed solar hookup ... and the cost for all your collector's fins will be a grand total of zero dollars and zero cents!

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Comments

  • Robert Robinson 1/2/2009 1:54:11 PM

    I retrieved Solar on a Shoestring from your Web site and it is a great article, but it refers to diagrams which were not included with the Web article. Could you forward those images?

    Also, as a professional editor I cannot help but point out that there are a significant number of grammatical errors in your Web content. The first sentence of the above mentioned article is a typical example.

    Best regards,
    Robert

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