| June 25, 2002 - Concrete Day |
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The rental van from Home Depot we got for the 90 minutes to get the materials home. Upon return, I had used 89 minutes...can you say "cutting it close?" |
| The stack of material we bought today. Doesn't look like much in this image, but there is an entire deck, walls and floor joists. Not in the picture are the sonotube for the pier and the conduit for the cables. |
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Next, came the moment of truth, the arrival of the concrete. As a surprise to me, the truck was able to pull almost up to the site, leaving only a small distance to have to wheel barrow the cement to the observatory. |
| To get the concrete down the footing sonotubes for the deck footings, we emptied the first part of the wheel barrow using a bucket. This way, the work we had put into (almost) leveling the tops. |
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After the first part with the bucket, we simply tipped the wheel barrow up and then used our hands to scoop the rest of the concrete into the sonotube. |
| Discussing the insertion of the rebar into the pier's footing. The fellow in the overalls was Rick, who delivered the concrete for us. You can also see that we have just finished pouring a wheel barrow full of concrete down into the pier's footing. |
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Once the concrete in the footings had been smoothed out, we placed the brackets into them. We attached a board of wood to them so that we know the posts we put into the brackets later will be straight, at least in that direction. |
| And finally, here is an image of the pier's footing with the rebar in place, waiting for a future pour of concrete for the pier. |
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In this image you can see the make shift table that we made to start putting the rings together, to ensure that we had a flat surface. The table itself was put together from material that will form part of the deck and the top is the skin of the dome and walls. |
| Here you can see me slowly screwing the segments of one of the rings together. I am slowly adding piece by piece to the stack after having verified that each individual ring fits together. What does not show up in the image is the fact that we drew giant circles on the top of the table that matched the outside circumfrance of each of the ring. |
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A close up of the rings. This particular ring that I am putting together is for the base of the dome itself. The rings for the observatory's walls have already been put together at this point. |
