Pier Mock-up and Door Building

It's been funny,

some days the observatory seems large and other days very small. Well after temporarily installing the pier then mocking-up the telescope with it's wedge mount I found I'll be lucky to get it all to fit!

Running down a plumb bob from zenith it's looking like about a 8" pier offset to the south, and the overall height looks to be very close.

Sorry for the poor photo but here is the mock-up, I'm very glad I spent time on this step, it will save a boat load of work later on

.

A few weeks ago Jim designed this logo and had an ink stamp made for our books, photos and later we will use it on our letter head, it's clean, simple and I like it.

Now for the Door

A swing out service door ended up to be hard to find as well as expensive with a long wait time, and after all that I still would have had to cut it down to fit.

So instead of paying $300.00 for a door, I made 2 lumber yard trips (70 total miles) spending $120.00 dollars in materials, and then invested around $400.00 in labor. The lesson I learned, it's only about twice the cost if you build it yourself.

Only kidding, total cost was less then $100.00 and took about 3 hours to build, and using the logo in the door panel worked out very well.