The 12' dome at Stone Haven Observatory
I heard about this dome in February, 2003. Apparently, someone was selling a house in Phoenix and wanted to remove the dome from the back yard. The realtor told someone in the East Valley Astronomy Club, EVAC to pass the word along-If you can haul it off, it's yours for free." My club, the Saguaro Astronomy Club, SAC, mentioned it at the March meeting. I figured it would go quick. April came and so did a couple emails to a distribution list I belong to. Same message, "Come and get it and it's yours." I couldn't believe it was still available. Well, May brought another reminder, so I figured I'd take a look.
Here's a series of pics showing the disassembly process in Phoenix.
Here's how it looked in the old yard. Barry is 6'2" tall. It measures 12' in diameter. The wall is 4' high and the dome rises another 6' from there, making it 10' high at the center. It wasn't in too bad a shape, considering its age. The paint was chalky and dented by hail stones. There was some patchy dry rot where water had collected under the bottom ring of the floor near the door, and the clamshell was going to need rebuilding from scratch, but mostly it was solid. | |
It took us 2 days to label it all, take it apart and haul it off. The first day I forgot the good cameras, so these were taken with a disposable one. The first thing to do was remove the 19 panels I call the "skin" from the dome rib work. These were nailed with aluminum nails on the outside, tacked in place with smaller nails and sealed with a bead of silicone caulk from top to bottom, (or bottom to top, hard to say.) We pulled all the aluminum nails out, one by one, then cut the silicone loose with a window scraper as high as we could reach from the ground. The result is shown here. Kind of a Dutch Boy haircut, huh? "Hey! Where's the dyke?!" | |
After that part was done, Barry stood on the ladder inside while I peeled from the ladder outside. I could scrape the silicone just high enough for him to continue from the inside all the way to the top. Each panel was done this way, taking maybe 10 minutes per panel. We had to be careful not to get cut by the sharp edges of the aluminum and not to bend it too much at the top, when we were tempted to just rip it off the glue. If we creased it anywhere, it would be a trick getting it straight again. More on that later on. This shot was taken after the first two panels were removed. The "bonus" shadow on the left is Barry's finger. (I recognize the fingerprint, don't you? FBI?) ;-) | |
The halfway point. Nine panels to go! (Just for posterity, this project was undertaken at a time that my back had been diagnosed with osteoporosis, having lost a high percentage of bone from my lower 4 lumbar vertebrae. The pressure placed on my nerves leading to my legs created pain beyond imagining for most people. I was, at the time, mostly unable to stand for more than 30 seconds before the pain became excruciating. Frequent breaks and Zen/Samurai/Ninja pain management allowed me to prevail. That and, oh yeah! A free dome!) | |
Here's a wider view of the same stage. You can see the ladder I used from the ground. Also, the clamshell laying on the ground on the right of frame. | |
Ok, we're making progress. All the aluminum skin has been removed from the dome, and we're ready to take it apart. | |
This is where we left off after the first day. If you click on the image, you'll find the Moon framed in the shutter. There's a similar shot through the spider of the rolloff here. | |
Here, we had started removing the ribs. First, we pulled the nails from the ones that connected to the shutter and removed them. Barry's looking up saying, "Now, you're sure this thing won't come crashing down on me?" | |
It doesn't look quite so funky from this angle. Barry's gona test my reflexes by tossing his hammer at me. I wasn't fooled. :-) | |
The tricky part was the last few ribs. We left two toward the rear and the big ones for the slot attached to each other, then removed them from the rotating ring. Finally disassembling them on the ground.The dome panels were made of aluminum, as was the wall, except the wall was one large sheet-37' long and 4' wide. |
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