Twenty-Eighth Passage

Guess what we did? Okay, I'll tell you. David is kinda amazing when it comes to building things and working with wood. And we've been trying to be more self sufficient lately, and I wanted a food dehydrator. So we made one. A solar food dehydrator. David looked it up online, read a few things, looked at some pictures, then we headed to home depot. We bought lots of materials, and even managed to fit them in the car. Barely.

See Morgan's head poking up?

 This is how David had to drive.

 I know it's super fuzzy, but I wanted to show you this angle. Lydia HATED it. Like, scream in anger and terror, hate.

The next few days were spent in David's parents' shop, where all the tools are, building the thing. I helped some. David had a picture in his mind of what it would look like, and just built it from that. I didn't know what it was going to look like until it was done.

Here's David cutting the plywood using a table saw. (I think!)

Then we did some routing. I helped.

We did a lot of wood cutting and routing. We did a lot of gluing and screwing, and drilling.

 We did a lot of measuring and stapling.

And in the end, we got a solar dehydrator!
See?

Oh, you don't see? Well, that's what it's like all taken apart.
Here's what it is like all put together.

We cut up some apples and stuck them on the screens, and the first day we put them out, it was overcast. It lasted for a week! Stupid fires. So, since there was NO SUN that first week, the apples molded. Gah!
But the sun finally came out, and we have had success since then.

Yay!
Lydia loves dried apples. She sometimes calls them candy.
I plan to use this much more next summer, since it's all cold now.

I sure do love having such a handy husband.

Update:
We painted the outside black so it would absorb the heat better. And it does. Morgan got to help this time around.