After three days of intense activity, this is the Bunker Ranch Observatory, lit by the setting sun peeking through clouds, on July 12, 2001. You're looking toward the southeast, so the rolloff support columns are in the foreground. Towering over the slab in the background is the actual observing building itself.
Note the dark, threatening skies - we had to stop work several times this week in order to wait out lightning in the area. Something about lightning and hanging onto 10-foot-high steel made everybody a bit nervous.
Hmmm ... clouds, rain, lightning - observatory. Is it just me, or does everybody else see a contradiction here, too?
In the middle of the building, you'll note that the concrete forms are still in place around the stairwell block wall. This is because they are doing double duty in supporting a temporary roof to keep the seasonal monsoon rains out of the basement, lest it turn into a swimming pool.
To the right, you can see the welder's trailer-mounted rig. All of this steel is firmly welded together to form a solid structure to withstand the occasional 100 mph winds that can come through this valley; that can put a tremendous amount of pressure on the building siding. The welder worked on the Alaska pipeline, so he is used to having welds X-rayed to make sure they're good -- we didn't push him quite that far on this project!
The largest steel members are the 40-foot 6x6x.250 steel tubes running horizontally in the foreground - these support the roof as it rolls off the building, and weigh 760 pounds each. It didn't take much mental arithmetic to figure out that we were going to need some mechanical help unloading the truck bringing the steel and more help hoisting it into place. So a boom truck was engaged to do the lifting; this greatly enhanced our fear of lightning with the boom sticking up 60 or 70 feet into the air!
The roof trusses can be seen laying in a stack behind the frame; it won't be long now and we'll be ready to enclose the building!
Next up: Rolling the roof
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Terry R. Friedrichsen
terry@venus.sunquest.com