This weekend I hosted a "100 Meter Dash" bike race here on Maui. The site was an abandoned section of the Mokulele Highway across from the Pu'unene Sugar Mill.
During the site survey the day before the race, I found the sugar cane grass had grown in so thickly on both sides of the road that there was no place I could pound in 2 x 2 wood stakes to hold the photocells. I would have had to chop away with a machete for hours. I tried to drill a 4 x 4 into the road surface using 4" deck screws, but the asphalt had been rolled so hard by trucks that I could neither drill nor pound a nail into it.
This being Hawai'i, the road surface was too hot to use tape switches. The switches would have boiled and failed.
When I got home, I went into my shop and devised these photocell mounts out of scraps I had lying around from my house rennovation. The key to this design are the leveling screws at the ends of the legs. I just plunked the mounts down on the road, tweaked the screws with a philips-head screwdriver until the mounts were free of any wobble, and the cells were ready to go. The race took 2 hours, during which the winds gusted to 25 mph, but the cells stayed rock-solid.
This solution is positively Fred-like in its zen simplicity and effectiveness. I have learned at the feet of The Master!
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