Well, it's done and it works! To celebrate, I just ordered 10 more lbs! I made a jig, very similar to Ifreds and Picmillans (sp?), soldered nine at a time, repeat 4x and slid them face down onto one of my pieces of glass. Then finished wiring the strings together on the glass. The glass shop guys gave me this black urethane stuff for car windshields and thats what I stuck the cells to the glass with. Like the others, I put one blob in the middle of each cell, then lined up my other piece of glass with spacers on top of the first. I pulled the spacers out and now the top piece of glass was sitting directly on the cells and the blobs of urethane flattened out as they stuck.
So far, I copied what others had done, What I did differently was to take the whole mess to my buddies at the glass shop and have them seal it up like they would a double pane window. The result is very nice and neat looking. He told me to silicone where the wires go in but I'm a little worried if I make it too airtight, the hot air in between the glass pieces might break something if it gets under too much pressure.
So anyway, no assembly pics, but here's some of the completed project. I was getting 18.6 volts at about 3:30 and a non-optimum angle to the sun. Short circuit amps were 2.6. I was seeing about 3.5 yesterday at noon but with no top glass on. Playing with shadows, I wonder If I should have put a diode in this thing. Amps drop like a stone with any panel shading whatsoever. Oh well, just keep it in the sun I guess!
