On the weekend I made an extremely awsome 10 Year Plan to do list. There has been a lot of planning and designing of the 10 Year Plan such that it is now very elegant, and very achievable, but to date there has been too much planning of the 10 Year Plan and not enough actually doing the 10 Year Plan. This, by its self is not such a bad thing after all you do need to know where you are headed in order to get there, but sooner or later I will actually need to start if I want to make it some day.
One of the things I am hoping to do to kick off the revenue stream is of course face painting as I have said previously (http://www.haydnallbutt.com.au/2011/02/11/getting-into-gear/). One of the places I am hoping to do this at is at local markets. In addition to the face painting though I am hoping to sell other items. Depending on the market you go to though you often have to make the products your self, so you can’t just resell items you got from somewhere else. I have had a think of a number of items that I could produce and sell. One of them is a line of softdrinks based around sparkling fruit juices. I have put together a drink cabonating set up already (finished on Sunday the 30th Jan, 2011) which I am in the process of putting together a video about, and am now getting use to using it and making up some recipes. I have already found that making your own sparkling apple juice is only about 29% of the price of buying the commercially produced juice from the super market. I have also tried sparkelling red grape juice and it is delicious.
The CO2 source is this CO2 tank under the bench:
The CO2 is then delivered to the bottles of drink via these tubes. The Grey disconnect is how the tubes connect to the bottles, and on the wall are two valves that I can switch on and off to allow the flow of CO2:
It works great and turns any drink into a sparkling carbonated drink in seconds unlike a soda stream which can only carbonate water. The video should explain better when I have had the chance to put it together.
This weekend just gone (Sat 12th Feb, 2011), apart from experimenting with some drinks I also picked up a second hand cargo barrier for my van. I made a floor for it to protect it from what ever I put in the back which had the added bonus of dampening the sound of the wheels and the engine from echoing around in the back. It is noticeably louder than driving a normal sedan. But in addition to the floor I also want to protect the side walls and the passengers in the front from what ever is in the back. New cargo barriers cost $449 but I picked this one up from a wreckers for only $200 which was great. So now I just need some side barriers and also some nudgebars for the front and the back. It is hard to see out the back of the van in particular so I think that will protect the back end to get them. Those I will pick up second hand, again from some wreckers, but I will probably have to make some sort of side barrier. Sort of like the panels shown here from Caddy Storage (http://www.caddystorage.com.au/flooring.html):
Wall cladding is surprisingly difficult to find though. There is a company in Germany that makes a really good wall cladding product called sowaflex, shown on pg 5 of this pdf (http://www.sortimo-central.com/downloads/Brochures/Toyota_Engl.pdf), but I can’t find anything like that here in Australia. Making my own panelling out of ply and lining it with removalists felt would not be too hard, but I don’t really know how to attach it to the wall of the van with out wrecking the wall. I may have to just make the panels and get some professionals to install them.