January 29, 2011

The holidays are well past and so is the 20 inches of rain we had along the coast in December. Fortunately the desert got a lot less rain - maybe that's why its called a desert? - maybe 3 to 4 inches total. That's the average annual rainfall total for our site.

Several days after the last blog, about December 14, the weather forecast changed to a heavy rain for much of the next week. I drove to Anza the morning of December 16th with Kristin to better secure the holes we made in the roof. What a miserable day! When we got there there was a heavy bone chilling fog - visibility nor more than 50 feet - a damp breeze, the temp no more than 40 degrees, and a light to moderate rain. I climbed up on he roof and sealed the holes with tarps, extra shingles, and held it down with cinder blocks. That seemed like overkill but it was really luck because even though the area only got several inches of rain, they did get winds in excess of 60 mph. Our temporary roof repair held.

While I took a hiatus over the holidays and even left the Golden State, John continued to come out over several weekends when the roads were repaired. He completed all of the support plates - four on each side - and welded all the support structure together prior to the 29th.

I arrived as usual on Saturday about 9 AM; John had driven out the evening before so that he could image. The plan was for John to continue with the steel work while I finished up the last of the electrical work and installed some door molding. As John's work occasionally needed two people, I would break from what I was doing and help him. My electrical work involved completing a hookup of a trunk line in the warm room. The new hookup provides additional power to Phillis' work desk and to my control desk.

John's work involved prepping the steel rails and roughly aligning them on the roof. Here is an end on schematic of what that involved:

This drawing is looking south to north on top of the east wall of the observatory. John has completed the welding of the Steel Support Beam along the east and west walls. On Saturday, we cut and beveled all of the Steel Rails for both rails and rough aligned them. It was a pretty heavy job since there were 40.5 feet of rails on each wall that needed to be lifted and put in place.

By lunchtime I had finished the molding and the electrical hookup and John was halfway through the steel rail placement. we called it quits about 4 PM. I was heading back home and like to be through the Ortega Hwy over the Coast Range before dark and John needed to prep his equipment for more imaging Saturday night. His plan was to stay until Tuesday and try to complete the accurate alignment of the steel rails and start welding them in place.

There are no photos this time because we wanted to devote our full time available to get this project to the point that Gary's crew can install the roof. I will update with photos next time around. We are getting close.