www.tanstaafl.co.uk

Another three day weekend, so soon! Just like buses…

As the poet said, “the best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley” and despite good intentions I’ve achieved very little on the observatory this week. Work has been sufficiently stressful that were it not for having bills to pay and suchlike I might well have decided to throw in the towel and get a job as a postman. Or as a swim teacher. Hints are regularly dropped by the teachers and staff at the pool where I swim and this week it has started to look very tempting.

Anyhow, I decided this morning to sort out the warm room lighting. Perhaps it was just as well I’d left it until the weekend given my previous comments. A certain amount of calm was required as the right-angle joins are not the simplest of things to get to work. They snap open and closed and have four raised contacts inside that are supposed to fit against the contacts on the ends of the LED strips where they have been cut, but they’re actually quite awkward to get seated correctly. Initially I made up the full run of LEDs and tested them to find that only the first strip worked. From there it was actually easier to work with the strips “live” so I could see when I had the strips positioned in the joining pieces correctly and snap them closed with a pair of pliers whilst holding everything in position with the other hand.

I also discovered that the joining pieces don’t sit far enough back in the aluminium section to allow the diffuser strip to go over the top of them which was a bit disappointing, but I guess I can live with that.

Once the lights were working I trimmed down the ply for cladding t?he second pier. I used a dustbin bag to cover up the NEQ6 that I already have in place whilst working to stop any dust getting on it. The process actually seemed to go much more quickly today than last time, and for a change I didn’t kill any drill bits. I ran out of time on the last side (the one with the access hole to get to the bolt that secures the mount), but nipped out again after dinner and fitted it whilst waiting for the chickens to decide it was bedtime.

So, one more pier to go and I think that should be all the really messy work done. I do plan to paint the pier cladding, but I think I might leave that for now as I can always lift the tiles around the piers to paint later, and instead think about flooring and finishing the storage so I can properly start on moving kit from the house.

The other thing I have at the back of my mind at the moment are the additional pier adapters that I need. I think I have some round aluminium bar that is big enough to make one for the HEQ5, but it is quite tempting to sidestep the problem and look at using a brake disc.

Though it’s a long way off, two sets of gear racks arrived today courtesy of our builder who had them on his pile of scrap to go to the tip. They’re from a stair lift he removed from a house he was working on. He’s going to deliver the motors and pinion gears later.

The heavier one is solid steel, but may not be long enough. The other is multiple layers of sheet steel.

The vague (at the moment) idea is that they could be used for opening and closing the roof automatically. But this is something I’m not going to be ready to do for quite some time, so these will just be put to one side for now, at least until I have the observatory in use.

Chopped up the wardrobe this evening and moved the pieces I still want into the observatory for assembly. Amazingly the workshop looks more empty already.

I also found a suitable 10mm bolt and tried my HEQ5 on the finished pier (the pier adaptor I have is reversible and fits a number of different mounts). Unfortunately the AZ pin that I have doesn’t fit very well with the HEQ5. I might have to make a new one. Strange that the HEQ5 tripod uses an AZ pin that’s part of the tripod head moulding, but the NEQ6 has a screw-in pin.

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.