December 19

We were right about last week's rain forecast - our desert site only had about an inch of rain compared to the 7 to 8 inches the forecasters predicted for the past week. When I got to the site this AM the other crew pouring cement for the other four, not three observatories - my mistake, were already at work. During the course of the day they brought in five trucks with a total of thirty-six cubic yards of cement.

Pouring the slabs down the hill from us.

By the time John showed up I had already laid out the four hundred feet of hose and set up the cement mixer. We spent a bit more time taking the tarps off the footings and once again vacuuming out the two footings holes - probably twenty pounds of loose material that blew in over the last two weeks.

Once we started we realized several things. The cement mixer was Chinese and it did work - barely. Once we dumped the water and three bags of Quikrete in and started mixing, we found that the baffles in the mixer were not well designed and did not mix the material in the bottom of the mixer. We had to stop every few minutes and hand mix the bottom stuff to get it uniform. I should have known with my previous experience with Chinese equipment that they are barely functional if they work at all - you get exactly what you pay for.

We also realized that because of the height of the top of the mixer that only I could load the 60 pound bags of Quikrete into the mixer - I had to lift the bag almost to shoulder height and then flip it over and onto the top of the mixer. We got through the first twelve bags, or 720 pounds of cement, pretty quick with me mixing, John and I sharing the transport to the footing holes by wheel barrel. Then John shoveled the cement into the footings and his wife worked the cement to fill in vacant pockets, all while I mixed another load.

Then we found out that the gods approved of our light hearted acceptance of their trick upon us the other week. The club contractor, who was directing the pours for the other observatories, came over and said that they were finished and did we want the remaining cement for nothing - about a cubic yard by his estimation. We of course said yes and the last cement truck pulled as far up our driveway as possible. The cement was dumped into our wheel barrel and we wheeled it over to our work area. We got a total of eight wheel barrels out of the truck and that turned out to be a bit more than we needed.
John taking a barrel of cement from the truck.

This was great! What we figured to be an all day job finished by noon. Of course now we have 48 remaining bags (1.4 TONS) of Quikrete that we have no current plans for but we do have some future plans. We are thinking of building a totally enclosed BBQ pit off the south side of the observatory. Also, we are thinking of building a pad for visual observing off of our south-east corner; it would include a small shed that would roll on rails set into the pad and would house my sixteen inch Dob reflector that has been mothballed for the last five years.

John and his wife working on the initial smoothing after the pour was complete on the west footing.

Close-up of the east footing completed and starting to cure. You can see the cement deep in the main hole. We may decide to add more cement there instead of entirely using back fill. The scratches in the surface are to provide a rough surface for the grout that will top off the footing.

John rough smoothing the surface of the west footing.

Today was the first time that we finished a days' work ahead of schedule so after we had lunch and basked in the 70 degree sunny weather for awhile, we walked around the site to see the other pads that were poured today. Tonight is the club's monthly star party so there were quite a few people starting to show up by mid-afternoon. One of the old timers said that today saw more construction at our site than has ever occurred previously in a single day.

Here I am having my turn to mug for the camera after the pour was completed.

While walking around the entire site, we came upon a view of our observatory site from an angle I haven't shown in this blog before. The picture below is from the southeast:

You may be able to tell that our whole site is on a small leveled area on a hillside about ten feet above the lower surrounding area. On the left in front of the observatory are the steel bars that we refurbished last summer. The sunlit side of the observatory is the south wall. You can see that there is no longer any structure remaining on top of the walls that was to support the originally planned dome. John's pop-up camper is to the right on the driveway. Behind the camper is the PVC frame for a large tent to cover our vehicles if we want - we haven't used it yet. The ridgeline is about fifty yards beyond the observatory to the north.

Here are two of the new slabs poured today. They are the ones from the first picture that showed the cement truck at work.

Notice the two open rectangles in each slab. Each one is the site of where a cement pier for a telescope will be placed. These observatories will be of simple stick construction and are much smaller than our observatory so they will probably be completed by February while we will continue to work until summer.

Our next plans are for John and I to work independently for a month or so. He will start on the heavy fabrication work for the rail system and the roof trusses at home. I will be working on removing the warm room window, rewiring the building, and replacing the hanging roof panels and lighting system.

December 5

John and I got out this day with the hope of pouring at least one footing. However, when we looked at the rebar and form construction, both had shifted slightly within the footing holes. The culprit was that several connection points of rebar were held together with the stiff wire that is often used. Apparently, us amateurs did not secure them tightly enough and our footings were slightly off. So we pulled the rebar out of the footing hole and John proceeded to weld every joint that had previously only been wired together. John welding the final joints. There is another grid layer of rebar still in each hole that is not attached to the pier support John is working with.

Remember that we are trying to get the top of the footings and the base of the rail support accurately positioned to within 1/16 of an inch and perfectly leveled with the back of the building five feet away. We actually spent the rest of the day completing that task. We probably would make a good comedy team for a construction gang. We eventually did get everything placed properly and solidly. Here's a couple of pics of the completed footing construction:
This is the west pier. The hammer in the foreground can give a sense of scale. The two steel horizontal beams are temporary and are used to position the frame level in the east-west direction. The two large clamps are also temporary to position the frame level in the north-south direction. The top of the large frame and the wood square are set level with a spot on the north face of the observatory using a laser level. When the cement has set, the wood square on top will be removed. The four bolts it is holding in place will attach to the bottom of the pier supports. The large wood frame will also be unscrewed and removed. The remaiing part of the pit will be backfilled to ground level.


In the above photo you can see down into the excavation pit of the east footing. The pit is 18 inches deep and approximately 3 1/2 feet on a side. There is a rebar grid about 4 inches off the bottom. The entire bottom of the pit will be filled to eight inches of cement covering the bottom rebar grid as well as the second rebar grid that is welded to the vertical rebar. This bottom part of the cement footing will end at the bottom of the large square wood mold. More cement will be poured into the center of the wood mold to the top of the mold and the bottom of the square plate. If you look close at the bottom of the upper right part of the pit you may be able to see a new friend of ours - a 2 inch long stink bug that didn't seem to mind the 40 degree temps all day.

While we were out there another construction team showed up to begin work on preparing the molds for the cement slabs for three more observatories. Here's a shot of them at work excavating and taken from the front of our observatory: They are working under the supervision of a club member who is a contractor. They plan to pour all three slabs on 12/19. Here is the supreme irony that the gods are treating us to. John and I have slaved pretty hard to haul in sixty bags of 60 pound Quikrete - read: 1.8 TONS - to our site and assembled our own portable cement mixer. Why? Because no cement business would come out to our site to pour such a small amount of work - we're five miles up a dirt road from the nearest paved road. We were originally invited and briefly considered joining up with the cement pour for the three new observatories but opted out because they did not plan to pour until spring and that didn't fit our schedule. As of now, we have gone slower and they have gone faster and guess what? On 12/19 when they have the cement truck in to pour the three slabs, we will be mixing our own small pour for our two footings. We could have the truck add a bit more to their mix and pour for us but that meant that we would have to haul out the 60 bags we already have on site.

The gods must be smiling!

On top of that ironic frustration, the weather was mostly overcast, windy, and temps stayed in the lower 40s. The picture below is of an unsual cloud formation called "lenticular". It occurs when strong, straight line winds blow consistently over an elevated area, such as a mountain. In this case this cloud is above the 7,000 foot San Jacinto Mountains on the west side of Palm Springs, about 25 miles to our east.

Below is another shot taken later in the day of a lenticular pancake - several lenticular clouds piled one on top of the other and pretty rare. I have seen that only once before and that was when we lived in New York and that occurred over the Catskills. On the bottom right you can see a water hose snaking off into the distance. That is a 400 foot long set of hoses that I have laid down the last three times we have been working in anticipation of mixing cement.

As we left we were concerned about the weather forecast thru 12/14. According to the So Cal super duper weather men who call a light drizzle a "torrential mist" and interrupt TV programs to warn of an incoming dew front, the desert could get as much as 7 inches of rain from 12/6 thru 12/14. Our estimation that they have their decimal point wrong in the forecast is holding as of today, 12/12 - there has been barely one inch of rain at our desert site.

We will be out there on 12/19, hopefully pouring at least one of the footings. That will end our work for the year.

Here's a fun picture I took from home on Tuesday morning after the first storm cleared out; that's the one that dropped so much snow over so much of the country this past week. This is looking east up my street at the rising sun. Prominent are the crespuscular rays from sunlight piercing through holes in the clouds.