Working on the Z in winter

[ghlkal]

I’m blessed to have a 30x50 shop/garage which I love to work in 6 months out of the year. The other 6 months are called winter here in Wisconsin and it gets cold. The shop isn’t insulated and it’s really too big and expensive to heat normally. (Yup, first world problem to be sure)

I decided I would try this experiment. I purchased a 10x20' “tent” for 60 bucks and set it up inside the garage. The ZR-1 is inside the tent. I can now heat inside the tent without heating the rest of the shop. Yeah, I know the tent isn’t very efficient at holding in the heat, but it’s much better than nothing. I just set it up today and I won’t really have a chance to use it for a couple weeks due to some other issues, but my preliminary test seems to indicate this should work. I plan to run my torpedo heater for 15 minutes inside the tent, and then switch to one of my electric heaters. In the small space, the torpedo heater will really warm things up, but it’s so darn loud. I’m hoping the quiet electric heater will be able to sustain the warmth over a few hours.

I’ll report the results in a month or so.

In the meantime, I’ll don my nomex suit and you can flame away regarding my idea.

Gary