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Circumstances have dictated that I shift some stuff out of the workshop and the house, so my first job today was to cut down the piece of worktop that I’ve been saving for a desk and get that fitted. It’s just resting in place at the moment as it will need some cut-outs making when I get the electrics done.

A NEQ6 has also made its way down from the house even though I have no suitable bolts to attach it to a pier yet.

I then took the circular saw to my son’s old wardrobe to make it shorter and less deep and install that in the warm room. The plan is to have drawers on the left hand side (I have a number of drawers saved from some other furniture) and shelving on the right. I may well remove the left hand door.

Of course I still have some sort of floor covering to put in the warm room, but for the moment I just had to get this out of the house and I can’t put it in the workshop because we need to empty stuff out of the workshop to get access to fix the electrics — at the moment I’m dragging a 30m extension lead around with me to whichever power tool I want to use next, which is really not desirable.

In the same vein I have a plan for this week to cut down another old wardrobe currently in the workshop and turn it into a cupboard to go in a corner of the scope room. It’s irritating that things have worked out this way, but such is life. It won’t be too hard to work around when I come to sorting the flooring as long as I don’t start filling it up with stuff 🙂

I also refitted the aluminium section in the warm room ceiling today, so I can get on with making up the lighting this week. Because it involves cutting the strip and rejoining it with right angle connectors I’m going to make it up on the kitchen table when no-one is looking and test it all out before fitting it.

And the last thing I’m going to attempt to make progress with this week is cladding the other piers.

There are a few hours of clear sky forecast this week. I’m hoping that one way or another I can get a mount and telescope fixed up to use, even if it’s just temporary.

Not so much progress over the last couple of days. The weather has been quite unpleasant and wandering between the observatory and workshop in the tipping rain doesn’t really appeal.

However, I have now finished painting the warm room:

which means there’s plenty I can be getting on with there. Installing the lighting, fitting the desk and chopping up a flat-pack wardrobe to make a storage unit to start with. Brownie points on offer for the latter too, as said wardrobe is currently occupying the space where my wife wants to set up desk for herself.

I’ve also been working on cladding the piers, which has turned out to be very slow work. Not helped by the fact that there’s a possibility a rodent has developed a taste for some of the wiring in the workshop and turned itself into a, err, “dead” short. Every time I enable one of the workshop ring mains it trips the RCD within a few minutes, even when there’s nothing plugged into any of the sockets on that ring. So that’s another problem that needs tracking down once I’ve made room to shift stuff around. Anyhow… I have at least finished cladding one pier and found a bit of wood that can fit on top just to finish it off:

The mounting plate won’t actually go on top as in the photo. I’ll cut a disc out of the middle for it to sit inside. Then I just need to point it north-ish and bolt on a NEQ6. I’d have done that already, but I’m almost ashamed to admit that I appear to have neither a compass nor any suitable M12 bolts! I did at least fix the cladding onto the pier using some of the mountain of rawlplugs (that I had no need for) supplied with the lighting strips. The cladding on the side facing that clamp on the floor has a hole in the top, by the way, so I can get a hand/spanner in for the purpose of putting in the bolt for the mount. In the fullness of time I might make a cover for that, to discourage little creatures with far too many legs from deciding that it would make a nice home.

There was another casualty today. The concrete blocks ate the business end of yet another masonry drill. I’m down to my last one in that size now. I see a Screwfix order in my near future.

Today I had a bit of a tidy up to clear away tools and materials that I probably don’t need in the near future, another trip round with the hoover and sealed all the joins between the ply in the warm room (no point insulating it if cold air can still get in).  I also removed and numbered all the sections of aluminium for the lighting.

After that I went for a swim with my daughter during which time my wife found me some tins of paint to investigate.  One was white, but there won’t be enough of that to do more than one wall in all likelihood, but the other two tins were “Lavender Cupcake”, whatever one of those is.  I’d call it a sort of pale pinky-purple myself 🙂 In boring conformity with common practice I decided to use those to do the walls and the white for the ceiling.  I started with the walls and I have to admit that I wasn’t entirely sure about the colour to start with, but actually now it has dried a bit the paint does go quite well with the “Galaxy Blue” of the scope room.  Having completed the walls I decided I’d call it a day and try to get the ceiling done tomorrow if time allows.  I’ve got a few other jobs that must get done first, but if there’s time to do the ceiling and for the paint to go off a bit then I can fit all the lighting.

More progress today, though I was slowed a little by having to share resources with my father-in-law who was making some new doors for the polytunnel.

First up was finishing off the last pier which was pretty straightforward.  Then I started lining the warm room ceiling during which time the aluminium section for the lighting arrived which meant I could actually get it all in place and complete the ceiling.  Even without a door (and with the roof rolled back) the warm room was getting a bit sweaty compared with the scope room, so it looks as though the insulation has some effect.

Just before 7pm I was thinking I was all done as I was given my “15 minutes to dinner” warning when I realised there was a small section behind the internal door lining that I’d missed.  There wasn’t time to do that, so it will have to wait for tomorrow.

My wife said she’d sort out some paint that we no longer need so I can see if there’s any I want to use for the warm room.  It might mean that not all the walls are the same colour though 🙂

After that I’m probably going to have to play things by ear a bit.  The weather looks to be taking a bit of a downturn into the weekend.

Today has largely been spent working with power tools.  The first job was to drill all the holes (both top and bottom) in the next set of blocks to make up the piers.  To void blowing out the inside of the block I started with a 5mm bit and worked my way up to 12mm in three stages.  Over twenty-four holes it takes quite a while.   I needed a break after that, so using the cut-off saw I chopped down lengths of threaded rod for fixing the blocks together and cleaned up the ends with the bench grinder.

Next was the really messy job: using the disc cutter to cut the remaining blocks in half for the top section of the pier.  I looked like a ghost from all the dust after doing that and had to come in to clean up a bit.  Finally I had to drill the last set of holes in the bottom faces of these half-blocks and put a single hole in the top for fixing the mount.

All the hard work done it was then just a question of taking all the bits to the observatory and assembling them.  As with the bottom blocks I used Gorilla Glue on one of the mating faces and as it requires moisture for curing I “painted” the other face with water.  In the instructions it says to just spray the face with water, but the blocks were bone dry and sucked up the water so I had to be a bit more heavy-handed.  After positioning the new blocks I pushed the threaded rod through the holes and tightened up nuts onto large washers on each side.

I managed to finish two of the piers before calling it a day, though I could quite easily have carried on by the light from the LEDs with the roof closed.  I took this photo after finishing the first (farthest) one.  There’s an NEQ6 tripod hiding behind it with the legs collapsed down as far as possible for height comparison.

Eventually these will all be clad with ply and painted the same colour as the walls, but in the short term I think I’m just going to focus on getting one sufficiently progressed to be usable.

There were, I’m afraid, a couple of casualties whilst using the tools.  I don’t think this chap is going to be much use any more.  I’m not entirely sure what happened to the pointy bit.

And this one will mend, but stings quite a bit at the moment.

A bit of an unsatisfying day.

My intention was to remove all the screws holding down the rails for the roof and seal all the holes to stop water getting in, removing one of the rails that has leaked in the past and sealing the underside of the V channel at the same time (so water can’t travel down the inside).

Yesterday when I opened the roof I didn’t roll it fully open, but to seal all the screws it was necessary to do so.  But it wouldn’t open all the way.  It was clearly binding somewhere, but I couldn’t work out where.  Checking the latch fittings made it clear they weren’t the problem, so I thought back over what I’d changed since the last time I’d had the roof right open and the only thing that occurred to me was adding the top section of cladding on the wall, so I removed that and still had the same problem.  “Ok, perhaps the roof is binding on the screws holding the rails down”.  So I removed a few of them and the roof did open about six inches more, but still not all the way.

Eventually (and this did take quite some time to work out) I realised that I’d laid a trap for myself.  The ends of my roof rails are still not supported where they extend beyond the warm room and clearly they have sagged a little over the winter.  As the first set of wheels started to run down the sag, the middle of the roof between the wheels was grounding out on the rails.  Hunting around I managed to find a section of old door frame destined for the woodburner that hasn’t yet been paid a visit by Mr Chainsaw and fashioned temporary props for the ends of the rails, in the process discovering that having the rails rise rather than droop also leads to the roof fouling the rails in a completely different way.

With that sorted my daughter and I spent a jolly hour or so removing all the screws, squeezing sealant into the holes and replacing them (and sealing up the rail).  After that I had to replace the cladding that I’d removed and so on.  I don’t like to feel that things have gone backwards.

So, next I really need to get the piers moving and to sort out the proper supports for the roof rails.  Not sure I can do anything about the latter until after the bank holiday weekend, so tomorrow I shall try to get the piers sorted.

Twilight is fading now and another check of the white LEDs suggests they’ll be quite adequate for the job, so I’ll look at getting another strip (it won’t need to be anywhere near as long this time) for the warm room and put them in the ceiling.  Initially I was thinking that I’d just have white for the warm room, but in fact I think it makes sense to have red available too, so if I’m doing something that involves moving between the scope room and warm room and I want to maintain dark adaption then I can do so.

Making that decision means I can now get on with lining the warm room ceiling.  In fact given that I still have some clips left and a few bits of the aluminium section to use as spacers, I could probably do the entire thing and get on with painting the warm room too.  Not sure I want the same colour as in the scope room though.