Housing for social cogs

This is where I had got with the elevation control as evening fell yesterday. The housing for the window motor and the cog end of the scissor jack screw. The evolution of the little plate on the left with the seven petal gear wheel in started with a piece of flat bar 5cm wide by 9mm thick. I drilled two big holes in it about 35mm in diameter an inch apart using a hole saw. After having the saw stick every second or two I abandoned dripping oil and took to using a little bath cleaner sprayer as lubricant for the drill press. It made a huge difference to the level of enthusiasm expressed by the teeth as they bit through the metal. Having made the weird little window I then realized it would be better to split the end and spread the two resulting prongs apart than to cut the jack cog hole bigger. I heated the sides and spread them apart, then welded two nuts on to put 5mm bolts through in the right spots to mate with the nuts embedded in the window winder body. Another job today was moving the bearing of the jack screw to the opposite side of its swivel joint. In the jack it was bearing on the correct side, but here it would have been doing nothing, so I thought it worth doing. The little bearing is the part just to the right of the cog here. If you work with metal a lot you might like to take a trip to the stationers and get a propelling pencil like the yellow one here. They now make 0.7 mm yellow (and other colored) leads for these, which make nice visible marks on steel. I used to use the chunky sticks of hard white chalk, but this new innovation is more precise and there is no snapping or need for sharpening.
Here is where I ended today, the housing is all welded and tested with the motor and this is the little plate side of it ready to have the motor screwed on. I did have to make a couple of little stick drawing in the end. It was hard for me to figure out what would happen to the motor end when the thing was in motion. Tomorrow I am going to make some long nuts or bolts with spacers to be welded on to the two arms of the pole top unit, then the entire thing will be in a functional state and I can complete the pole part for mounting on the roof.

It is not hard to see why so much in the world that is functional is also ugly. After all the work of constructing the prototype there is little energy left for easthetic concerns. Perhaps a lick of paint and a rain cover will suffice.