Electrolysis Project Page 57

Here you can just barely make out the depth of each slit. It's a little more than 1/2 the thickness of the 1/4 inch plate itself.

You need to add weight or hold down the area that's already been cut or it will start to bow upwards. That will cause your following slits to go too deap and it will also make them pinch when the spacer plate is straightened out... very bad! So be sure to weight down your spacer plates as illustrated here. -Just be DAMN careful to stay away from the nasty blade. I'm not responsible for any accidents or lost fingers here guys! Get something heavy enough to hold the polycarbonate down by itself. That way you just have to move the weight every so often. --Notice the blade was stopped here for the picture.

Almost finished. I decided to put about 130 slits in these first 2 plates. I did this because I only cut 256 stainless plates for Bill and myself. That's 128 each so we won't need any more slits unless we acquire more stainless plates. --If we find that we can go above 128 plates in our boxes (that's under 1v per cell folks!) then we will just get more 6x6 stainless plates and then machine up some more spacer plates (with more slits) for ourselves.

The whole purpose of the spacer plates, if you recall, was to provide a near perfect seal between each plate (cell) and also to provide near perfect spacing between each plate. Talk about killing 2 birds with 1 stone.

I bet I was loosing a TON of efficiency in my old cell (the one with weed-wacker cord) due to leakage around the plates. That leakage would reduce efficiency drastically so I have very high hopes for the performance of our new electrolyzers.

Doing the last few cuts now. I had the feed set to a slower rate tonight since these were the first pieces. It went so well that I'll try speeding things up a bit more next time. It took about 1 hour per spacer plate, to do all of these slits.

Ready to start the second one here.