Skybox 1.0 served faithfully for eight years, but I finally gave in to the inevitable and got a better mount, and it won’t fit into the old Skybox. So time to move on. Skybox 2.0 started construction a couple weeks ago. I’ve made some fairly good progress, so I figure I’d better get a build thread started before I make too many mistakes that can’t be fixed. There’s always good advice to be had here.
Skybox 2.0 is a 10x12 ROR with two piers, one for deep sky and one for planetary. That sounds tight, and it will be, but I’ll rarely be inside it, since my house is 20 feet away. Also, one “benefit” of having terrible horizons – the Hole in the Trees – is that I don’t need to see much of the sky because, well, there’s nothing to see but leaves in most directions. So after setting both mounts up in my basement for a couple weeks and working out all the measurements, I’m pretty sure the two mounts will see everything there is to see and almost never interfere with each other. The east pier will have a C11 on a Paramount MX+ (the new mount) and the west pier will have a CPC1100 fork mount on a Milburn wedge.
I’m mostly following the SkyShed plan, though I put the foundation on posts in concrete rather than having a floating foundation. I’ve ordered steel piers from SkyShed, which will go on 16” concrete footers sunk 3.5 feet deep and rising to about 3” below the obs floor. The footers are my only real worry so far. While waiting for the piers, I dug the footer holes and put in sonotubes, and went ahead with the rest of the build. I want to hold off pouring concrete, and setting the j-bolts, until the piers arrive. While in theory I could have made templates for the pier bases and gone ahead and poured the concrete, I’d much prefer to have the actual piers. The chances that my homemade templates would be perfect are very low. 😊 The downside is that cardboard tubes aren’t really supposed to sit in dirt for weeks on end. But we’ve had a dry summer so far, the obs floor covers the footer holes (I don’t plan to cut the holes open until I’m ready to pour), and until the last couple days (since the walls went up) I’ve been covering the worksite with a tarp. So hopefully everything stays dry down there.
Kevin
Edited by astrovienna, 26 June 2017 - 09:32 PM.