Foundations
The construction finally gotten serious. The excavation is done. Twice. First time using excavator that was doing some heavy ground work on another project. This part was completely unplanned. The excavator operator asked:
Hey Tomek, do you want anything other digging done?
In couple minutes I came up with the location and layout of the observatory. Of course, I thought about this before, but haven’t had anything measured or planned in details. So I eyeballed the whole thing and went with _dig two 1m by 1m by 1m holes here and there". Five minutes later I was a proud owner of two holes in the ground.
Soon enough I found out that they’re too close to each other. So had to dig one by hand. Now I know that a weekend of software engineer time equals 5 minutes of excavator time :)
Anyway, this was the situation with formwork done:
First, the bottom foot was poured first. Not sure if that’s the proper term for it. It’s the bottom part without the pier itself. Since I was doing this work over weekends, I’ve continued pouring the piers after 7 days. In the mean time, I’ve came up with a system to level the telescopes. It consists of three massive rods. The diameter is 36mm. That was the largest threaded rods I was able to find.
A week later, the formwork pipe was put in place and concrete was poured again.
After two tedious weekends, I now have two piers. The only thing left to do is to build an observatory around them. Stay tuned.
