Well, heck, that was all prety easy, and so we decided to tackle the floor tiles. The snap-together foam tiles really surprised me. Call me cynical, but I've come to expect a certain amount of, oh, frustration, when I work on anything in my dome.
The floor tiles just worked. We cut the center out of one of the tiles slightly smaller than the base of my pier. Slid it over the pier, and started snapping in tiles around it. I was a litte worried about dealing with the pieces that butted up against the round walls, but the tiles are very easy to cut, and cutting them to fit the dome was absolutely no problem. I think we finished in less than an hour:
So we break for lunch, finish, and amazingly enough it's still not raining! Time to think about putting stuff back into the dome!
So one of the things I have to deal with is that the conduits between my pier and the wall have a LOT of water in them. So I borrowed my neighbor's shop-vac and air compressor, and blow the water out into the shop-vac. This works GREAT! We pull the cables I need (I'm just running an extension cord to a UPS instead of the electrical box sticking up in my way), and some data cables.
We bring my computer, eyepieces, toolbox and mount to the dome, and assemble the stuff. The computer works, it can still talk to, and control the dome. The mount goes back together. It's all so easy:
So it's time to attach the scope. That's really all that's left. There's one small problem though. It takes 6 1/4" x 20TPI x 1 1/8" socket head cap screws to connect the scope to the mount. I put these screws away when we disassembled the scope. But they are just gone. We search all the logical places in the house. We next search the illogical places. They are just nowhere to be found.
Well, that stopped us. I'll have to buy some bolts in Dallas this week, and attach the scope next weekend. So close!
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