November 5, 2010

I know, its been a while since the last post - almost 3 months! Construction has slowed down for several reasons: I had a busy schedule with my docent volunteer work at Palomar Observatory, our unseasonably heavy rains over the last several weeks have made the dirt road access to the observatory a bit more hazardous than my car can handle (about 3 inches over the past month but ten times the average), plus John has used up all his vacation time for the year. That's the real bottleneck because we are at the stage that a lot of steel fabrication work is necessary and that is John's forte. Nevertheless, work has advanced far enough to justify another blog.

I drove out to the site this past Friday for the day with my new helper - my daughter Kristin, who just moved to Orange county with her husband in mid-October. John arrived about noon but he was staying for the weekend. Together we completed more than we had planned for the day. Fall is a great time in the desert - bright sun, temps near 80, very low humidity, light breezes.


Kristin and I got there about 9 AM as usual and, after touring her around the whole 17 acre site, including the bunk house for the showers and bathroom, I put her to work. She jumped right in and painted the last interior wall to the warm room area:

She finished that up pretty quickly and then she primed the interior walls of the observing area. Since the cinder blocks were so dry from being exposed here so long, it will need a second coat, just like the exterior walls will.

Kristin had all the painting done by the time we broke for lunch.


While she painted I excavated outside around the east rail support column. I thought we were finished with that work but we forgot one thing: we need to use a 40 amp welder and do a number of welds at the top of the rail. For that, we need about a five foot high temporary platform for the equipment and welder when we get to that point. John had previously assembled the platform but we needed about five feet of additional space excavated from the hill side around the rail support columns. I completed the west side excavation back in August and John started the east side a couple of weeks ago. My job was to finish that off. I spent most of the day moving 11 wheel barrels of stuff from that point to the head of our driveway about 30 yards away. The fun part - right! - was digging out a large chaparral bush also. While digging I hit a large underground burrow - fortunately, it was empty.


Here I am fighting with the chaparral bush. John has been doing a lot of steel fabrication over the last couple of months. Here is some of the work he has done:

Top of the west wall showing 3 steel pieces that are anchored thru the wall with steel bolts. They will position the horizontal steel beams that will support the rails.

This is a very complicated piece:


This is the corner brace for the southwest corner. What is not visible are the two vertical tabs extending down the outside just like the two visible on the inside. Again, steel bolts extend thru the cinder block wall and the vertical tabs. This picture is 180 degrees from the picture above so you can see there are four positional pieces on the west cinder block wall.

We ended up the day by closely positioning two of the horizontal support rails. These are 18 foot sections of 2 X 6 steel tubing. It doesn't look like a big deal but when you have to squat on the edge of a roof and slide almost 300 pounds of steel into position, it gets a bit tiring very quickly.

This is the west support rail - almost in position. In this shot it needs to slide out a total of four feet beyond the rail support post. It also needs to be laid horizontally rather than vertically. The other end rests on one of the positional supports from the west wall previously pictured above. We were surprised at how little give there is on the middle of the rail, despite not having a support column in place. Despite the fact that this rail will be equally sharing a 4,000 pound roof, we decided it only needs one additional support column above the current warm roof, rather than the two we had originally planned.

That was pretty much everything we got done. Finally here is a shot of John and I standing in the newly excavated area, grinning broadly since we know for sure that all of the excavating is finally complete. Next to us to the left in the shade is the temporary platform that John constructed.

Now a bit of biology. Near the observatory we found a small skull, probably from a rodent. What puzzles us though are the two long fangs that seem to be much larger than the rest of the cranium. If anyone can identify this, please let me know - maybe a snake?
Over the next couple of weeks I hope to complete all of the second coat primer painting in the observatory area and around the exterior of the building. John will continue with the remaining steel fabrication before we have our friend come in with the 40 amp welder for the heavy duty welding.


Next blog I'll show my new deep sky imaging setup, explain what it took to assemble it, and talk about how it works.