Day 2, container arrival and unpacking

I am posting this from memory that is one week old.

On Monday, Peter was in LA at the docks overseeing the initial unloading of the major components onto flatbed trucks. There were initially 3 containers, but one was overweight for California roads, so Peter opted to unload the major parts onto flatbed trucks.

We met the containers in Big Pine. I had to look around town for 3 out of 4 of the containers. We had told them to meet at 395 and 168, near the trailer park, but some of the drivers decided to park and sleep in an empty lot. Luckily, it is pretty hard to miss a telescope in the middle of Big Pine.

Driving up the road to Cedar Flat was a minor adventure, there is a narrow pass where the road necks down to one lane. Peter and Albert drove ahead to make sure the path was clear before they let the four trucks through. Those drivers were pretty impatient to get up there.

I took a photo from my iphone on my way up. This is the beginning of the scary part. You cannot see what is coming around the corner.

After the trucks arrived, the Vertex guys dug right in and started unloading. The first problem was that the Mirrors boxes were stuck next to each other an needed to be pulled apart. Peter decided to use a somewhat unconventional approach to separating them, but it seemed to work fine.

Daniel was then eager to jump in between the crates to thread the harnesses for lifting.

Another odd thing about the packing was the the lower boom was too large to lift through the top of the container. BZ, the crane owner and operator had to thread the boom all the way to the back of the container, while Daniel guided it though and Albert gave hand signals on how to move it.















Overall, it only took 4 hours to unload the truck and send the drivers off barreling down the highway. There was enough time left to place the tower onto the pad. We had the CARMA staff pre-intall the mounting bolts into pad 25 from drawings. Everyone was nervous that they would not be in the right spot. The problem is that the pad is not flat, it is pitched to shed rain. This also confuses us a little, because Peter wanted to use this fancy ancient optical level to set the hight of the feet. Apparently, you can get 0.001" accuracy with the level.