Today I went to the pool with my daughter so she could also do some training. I’m almost back up to the full distance I would normally expect to do now, though still a little on the slow side. Hopefully I can make inroads on that this week.
USRPT distance this year: 79,900m
Total distance this year: 182,200m
The weather this weekend was quite wet and windy, but I managed to get out early(-ish 🙂 on Sunday to start fixing the northern gable in place. Everything went quite nicely to plan in terms of rolling the roof over the warm room and fixing everything from a ladder with the exception of the rain that started to fall once I’d done about half the job. I decided to stick with it and finish off, finally getting the roof closed up again about five minutes before very heavy rain started (though I was already soaked at this point anyhow). I also found an old door to temporarily prop in place to keep most of the rain out of the doorway.
The photograph below was taken well before sunset, believe it or not. The sky was just so dark.
Next steps are to get the ducting for the wiring to the piers into place under the floor, get the lower sections of the piers themselves in place and put insulation between the joists in the warm room. Once that is all done I can start putting the floor down.
[Edit: some additional photos taken during the day to show progress]
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
