Well, swimming five days in a row now. That’s a first for this year I think. Perhaps it demonstrates how much fitness I’ve lost by having three weeks off 🙁
Anyhow, same stuff as yesterday, but happily I’m not feeling as tired this evening. Maybe it’s having an effect at last. Two days off over the weekend now whilst I decide what to do next week.
USRPT distance this year: 78,650m
Total distance this year: 180,550m
Same story for today as previous days this week. Just getting used to swimming again.
USRPT distance this year: 77,650m
Total distance this year: 179,150m
A little more progress yesterday evening…
I’d measured up for the north-east gable once, but when I came to check the measurements over they clearly couldn’t be right. The pitch of the roof wasn’t anywhere near the same as the southern end and that worked out fine. So I measured everything once again, this time clamping bits of scrap timber into place to give me marks to work from. My second set of measurements came out to within a couple of millimetres of those for the south-west gable, which pleased me greatly given how such a large roof frame was welded together sitting on saw-horses on my drive.
Happy with the measurements I cut the final sections of OSB to close off the gable and they’re now sitting inside the observatory waiting to be fitted this weekend. They’d best be right, as all I have left of the 20sqm of OSB that I bought or had sitting around to use on the roof is in small pieces that probably wouldn’t even cover 1sqm.
I’ve decided to try to avoid climbing onto the warm room roof to do most of the fitting. I reckon if I open the roof about 1/3rd of the way then I can hold the OSB in position and fix most of it from a ladder propped against the end wall of the warm room. If I struggle to reach the ridge then I’ll push it closed and just do the last few screws from the warm room roof. Saturday isn’t looking too clever at the moment weather-wise (again) unless I can get up and out there at the crack of dawn, which really isn’t me. On the plus side, the rain all appears to be coming in on southerly winds, so if I can’t get the membrane on until Sunday the OSB should still stay dry.
Another easier session today, but still building up from the previous one. It must have been harder, too — I could feel the heat being generated in my lats as I was driving home afterwards.
USRPT distance this year: 76,650m
Total distance this year: 177,750m
Another session to get back into swimming again today. Slightly better than yesterday perhaps, but still astonishingly hard work.
USRPT distance this year: 75,650m
Total distance this year: 176,350m
Recently I’ve been trying to print some replacement cups for the anemometer on my 1-wire weather station. The existing ones have started to decay quite badly so I thought I’d try to print some replacements using PLA, with a view to using something more robust later on if it goes well.
Well, so far it hasn’t gone well. In the main the cups look great, but the tops of the cups become a real mess because they’re so small that the PLA hasn’t had time to solidify sufficiently by the time the next layer starts.
I tried printing more than one at once, but that didn’t help. I also tried raising the minimum time per layer in Slic3r, but that didn’t help either, I believe because the minimum time is overridden by the minimum print speed. I didn’t particularly want to lower that.
After dithering some time I have decided that what I really need is a cooling fan for the extruded material. There are tapped holes on the hot end carriage that would be suitable and I’m sure I have a fan lying around that would do the job, but unfortunately the controller board for my printer does not have a PWM-controlled fan output and I’d prefer not to have the fan on all the time (especially for the first few layers).
It was suggested that I could just use a fan on a separate PSU and turn it on after the lower layers are complete, but that’s quite a faff and I’d need somewhere suitable to mount a switch. So I decided to bite the bullet and upgrade the controller to an Arduino Mega 2560 and RAMPS. That has now arrived and is sitting on my desk awaiting fitting, which I think will be a holiday job.
Today may be something of an event. I actually achieved what I set out to achieve on the observatory today 🙂
To be fair, it wasn’t an awful lot. Just before the Sun set I remembered that I needed to test the end flap for fit so I rushed out to do that. One small adjustment and I was able to finish off the construction in the workshop and cover the outside with membrane. That’s basically it.
Tomorrow I shall try to fit it in place temporarily so the south-west end of the observatory is rain-proof, and then measure up for the north-east gable, hopefully getting that cut as well.
After a long break thanks to suffering quite badly with some horrible cold virus that just wouldn’t die, I finally got back to the pool today. This week at least is just going to be getting back into the swing of things and then we’ll see how it goes over the holiday period.
USRPT distance this year: 74,850m
Total distance this year: 175,150m
Despite a whole day working on the observatory I don’t feel as though I’ve achieved much today. The days are getting so much shorter however. I came in for lunch today and realised that by the time we’d finished eating there were really only two and a half hours of daylight left 🙁
Anyhow, the gables are now my priority because once those are closed off the structure should be rainproof as long as I stand something in front of the door. I started today by cutting OSB to fit the fixed section of the south-west cable (part of the rolling roof) and fitting that into place, covering it with breathable membrane.
That done, I started the construction of the folding section of the wall at the same end. I reached the point of needing one final test for fit, but the Sun was well gone and there just wasn’t enough light left to work by. I’m hoping that I can check the fit tomorrow during the day and then finish the frame off during the evenings this week as fortunately it’s just small enough to fit in the workshop. If I can do that and get it temporarily fixed in place (has to be temporary because I don’t want to fit the hinges until the cladding is all in place), then that should be the south west gable done for now.
The north east gable will need me to get up on the warm room roof to fit. That’s not a big deal, but does require daylight and preferably dry weather too. Hopefully I can get the boarding cut during the week so it’s all ready to go at the weekend assuming the weather plays ball. If I can get that done, or maybe even if I can’t, I should be able to make progress with the trunking for the cabling under the floor, at which point it’s time to give serious thought to getting the floor down.
With the roof keeping the rain off the top, I need to stop it getting in the sides as well before I can think about putting down the floor (and there are a couple of other things besides that need sorting before I can do that, too).
Fortunately most of the wall area was easy to deal with, just wrapping it in breathable membrane. I started this quite late in the afternoon and ended up working until daylight failed, as seems to be the case quite regularly now. It was so dark that my camera couldn’t find anything to autofocus on for this picture 🙂
I’ve boarded the sides of the roof with 9mm ply and then covered those with membrane as well. If you look at the area of the photo showing the inside of the roof in this photo you’ll see what the weather was like at the time 🙁
Feather-edge boarding has also arrived for cladding the walls. I chose feather-edge because it suits the rural setting and matches the beer shack immediately next to it. I’m not sure when I’ll get this started. Closing off the gables is really the next priority.
Finally, a couple of photos showing the inside now it’s starting to look a bit more like a building…
