Solar panel production line (automated)

Hi guys

This is my first post in this forum, so here goes.

here is a production line for solar panels I have put together using IC2 and BC.

this is an overall view, if you see the automatic crafting bench on the left, that is where the solar panels are finally put together.

they are then outputted into the chest next to it.

here is an example of the start of one production line

notice the sign says Coal 18? this is how it really works.

I have gone round to each chest where i deposit the raw materials and put a sign up telling what goes where, including how much. if you go round you can make 6 solar panels as this is the smallest number you can make for ALL the inputs to be integers. (I cheated a bit!, for the batteries for the generator you just put in copper wire, rather than copper ore and rubber)

then all that is needed is to set my redstone clock running in the basement

And the resources will flow through to produce my fantastic solar panels.

This was all created without TMI, or anything else to give me free materials. (If you think this is too many mats to have in one map, i have also made a couple of nuclear plants, among other things )

questions? comments? I would love to hear from you.

Yeah, I like the sound of diamond pipes, I use them to sort my materials from BC quarries, sending my cobblestone to the recycler then to the matter transformer. I am slightly surprised, why I didn't think of them for this myself. lol, I am not going to change it now, too much reworking for a benefit hardly worth it. it is so simple currently despite having multiple chests.

I have been looking at Equivalent exchange and am sorely tempted, however it seems like a delayed TMI, you can get anything and as much as you want, it just takes a little while. Still on the fence for that.

The only problem with this system is the speed of namely the macerators. it causes bottlenecks with ores if the ores are not slowly fed into the system. I think you could make around (evenly) 12 solar panels at any one time. then you would have to let the iron filter through before adding any more.

(you could in theory ad 64 iron ore instead of 48, however this gives a number of solar pannels that isn't an integer giving you a headache trying to keep everything else even)

Solutions would involve adding more macerators, but would involve heaps more space and pipe headaches, i had plenty with this system, despite my forward planning on how the pipes would be placed not to clash.

I guess you could get the addon that gives you rotary macerators, but for now i am sticking to the original due to I will have to download and install everything again when the next MC update comes out. I don't want to get attached to too many mods.

Quick update to my system. I have stopped using redstone clocks to power all the pipes and quarries For this plant. Using them excessively makes minecraft complain and slow down on me. I reccently discovered you could change one of the buildcraft config settings so that wooden pipes and quarries and the like would accept a constant redstone pulse, so now i use a lever! no redstone required!

One other upside to this is that rsources are always extracted at the fastest rate possible. I.E. once every 25 ticks, or 1 1/4 seconds. makes for better efficency, especially when dealing with aggregators in EE.