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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.

Like yesterday, not a huge amount of progress today — spent much of the day mowing grass and visiting some of my bees at a local farm.

I did however manage to get the final piece of cladding onto the last pier (woohoo!), completed the scope room cupboard and had a sweep up. Probably need to get the vacuum cleaner in to get rid of the last of the dust.

So, now I can order the flooring. I can’t decide whether it’s worth sealing the ply with a coat of varnish before I lay the floor tiles. I don’t think it should slow things down much (if at all) as even if I order the tiles tonight I don’t think I’ll be in a position to fit them until the weekend. Need to have a quick scan through my list of things to do to make sure there’s nothing else I absolutely must do before the floor goes down, too.

Didn’t get much done today as I had other things to be doing, but had an hour or so this afternoon that allowed me to get the cladding on three sides of the last pier. I’ll be very pleased if I can finish it off tomorrow. I still have to drill holes in the tops for the pier adaptors, but I don’t think that should be as messy.