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A little delayed, the foam floor tiles for the scope room arrived today. I couldn’t just leave them sitting there so I spent a good half hour just playing with arrangements to try to minimise the cuts around the piers. I even thought about offsetting rows from each other, but the edges of the tiles are effectively “keyed”, so that isn’t possible. In the end I came up with something that meant two of the three piers were fairly straightforward to work around. The last requires a hole to be cut from the middle of a tile, or I accept that there will be at least a couple of joins that aren’t keyed together.

A couple of hours or so later, here’s what I have:

That last tile standing up is the awkward one to fit around the pier and it is the last one I have. There is no room for error. The waste (from two dozen tiles) is what’s lying on the floor. In fact that’s not entirely all waste, as I have a couple of little bits still to fit around the trunking and on the right hand side of the closer pier. It was 10pm and I was feeling a little tired, so I decided I’d leave the complicated bit until tomorrow.

Overall I’m very pleased with them. They’re comfortable and warm underfoot (I was working barefoot again) and very easy to work with. They cut very easily with a sharp knife and can be marked with a pencil when measuring them up. I was a little confused initially by the fact that the edging pieces didn’t all match. They are one of two shapes and won’t fit along an edge together. It’s necessary to stick with one of the edges or cut a little piece off the second so it matches. Hardly a big problem. They were really quite smelly when I opened the packaging too, but either that got better during the course of the evening or I got used to it 🙂

I have cut the tiles to fit a little more snugly than has been recommended to me. As I don’t really know how much expansion there will be over the area I have I decided I’d leave a small gap and if I need to take off a little more that won’t be a problem.

Also arriving today were the “feet” for the posts to support the ends of the roof rails. They’re basically a U-shaped bit of galvanised steel plate to hold the end of the post with a short section of rebar (also galvanised) welded to the bottom. The rebar just goes into a bit of concrete in a hole in the ground. I’ll take a photo when I get around to fitting them. My cup truly runneth over as that wasn’t even the end of it. A new (to me) PSU arrived to replace my old Maplin XM21X that died a while back.

I was hoping to get the power supply plugged into a mount and sort out a telescope to do a little lunar viewing tonight and perhaps even some imaging, but tiredness has caught up with me a bit. Saturday after next is the first anniversary of breaking ground on this project though, so I’d really like to have an opportunity to use it by then.

Gorgeous day today, though it started a little chilly despite the sunshine. I mowed around the observatory and did some prep work for laying the foam tiles, and as suggested by other observatory builders used some off-cuts of EPDM to close off the gaps between the piers and the floor (though I haven’t fixed them down yet):

Because it was such a lovely day I had the roof rolled back and I thought I’d get a picture of the mounts “in situ”.

And between doing other jobs I started to move some things down to the observatory to clear space in the house, which has involved finding some things I’d pretty much forgotten I had, they’ve been stored so long whilst we’ve been doing work on the house. I’m still not quite sure how I have so many of these.

Need to give the locking bolts a bit of a clean-up before they go back onto mounts. There’s some corrosion around the threads on all of them and one is particularly bad. Might need to look into something I can put on them to help prevent the dew getting to them that isn’t likely to get spread around places I’d rather it wasn’t.

Disappointingly though, my floor tiles were due to arrive “by 8pm today” and there is no sign of them as yet 🙁 It seems unlikely I’ll get them this weekend now. Looks like I might be sealing more of the floor whilst I wait.

Allen bolts for fixing down the pier adapters arrived today, so this evening I got on with fitting those to the tops of the piers and putting the mounts back in place. There’s probably no reason why I couldn’t go for an initial alignment on the next clear night now, assuming I can find a 12V supply for them.

The floor tiles didn’t arrive today however, so once again I hoovered the floor and then finished up my first tin of varnish giving the floor that I sealed last night a second coat. Hopefully the tiles will arrive tomorrow and I can start laying them.

Nothing too exciting today. I swept the observatory floor, then hoovered, then hoovered again, and then worked barefoot to get about 80% of the scope room floor sealed with a coat of varnish this evening. It actually went very quickly. I was planning on doing the rest of the scope room and the warm room tomorrow, but I’m half-tempted to give what I’ve done a second coat instead, then lay the tiles for about half the floor (assuming they arrive by Saturday) and seal the rest after that’s done. Whilst more complicated it would allow me to move more stuff out of the house sooner. I’ll see what I think of the first coat tomorrow morning. I might even be able to sneak out during the day and get some done if work goes well.

In other news, carpet tiles for the warm room have arrived, as has a second, used EQ6 pier adapter that happened to come up for sale earlier this week. Seemed too good an opportunity to miss, that. So I didn’t 🙂

I also have some stainless M8 Allen bolts (with washers and nyloc nuts) on order for fixing the pier adapters to the top of the piers and a couple of fixings for the posts to support the ends of the roof rails. I still need the posts, but at least I can out sort out the bases.