Ad Astra Observatory

I woke up this morning at 8am, ready to start cutting out clamps.

I decided to recycle some wood that was once a part of the back porch of the house, because it felt like a good way to remember that this place is a part of Trixie.

I had a nice-looking chunk of 2×6, and I decided that I could chop it into primals and then rip those in half to give me 2×3’s, which are a little more compact but probably just as sturdy as the 2x4s I’d been using.

Now that I was in “full production”, I could really do a lot of work at once. I set up the saw jig for 5.5″ and blasted off 6 primals. Then I moved it to rip the primals in half. Then I started measuring out all the hole positions.

I got a little carried away and put the wrong hole positions on half the blocks, because the lowers will have a different setup than the uppers. Oh well. No harm done.

I set up the drill press jig for the new width and did all of one hole, then reset it for the other direction and did all the blocks for the other hole.

Then, since I knew that I was done with the drill press bevel (the lowers will have a different bevel), I set the bevel back to 0° and cut all the through holes.

Back to the saw, I set up the jig to cut the blocks into clamps, and whipped those out.

Then I assembled all the finished clamps, and started installing truss poles.

I had a little bug in one of the clamps (it had been problematic from the start and I knew it wasn’t going well for that one), so I replaced it with the carefully-measured 2×4 one from last night.

As soon as I got all 6 poles in place, I suddenly had a truss! The clamp surfaces are close enough to level that I don’t think it makes a difference, and I was able to take a photo of the upper truss all test-fitted together:

If you look closely, you can tell that the lower ring in the photo has no holes in it; it’s my spare ring blank from the original build back in 2008. The next thing I did was pull the hardware off of the upper ring, because I used the spider to find the center of the blank, and the original pole seat holes to mark the same spots in the corners (I have it in my head that I will be using these to mount the clamps…)

Next up is to route out the center hole in the ring blank (I have to decide whether I leave a groove for a possible mirror shroud — I probably will if I can figure out how to set it up), and prepare to attach the upper truss clamps to the rings. I should be able to test the focal length by the end of the day.

Good progress this morning!