Back in at the mountain

This is Huan, and I am back at Cedar Flat today. Things are very different after one, week, but the telescope basically looks the same. It seems as though Marius and Dave have the keys to the manlift now, and they are the mirror adjustment crew. Unfortunately, they ran into a roadblock because the rods on some of the panels are not long enough. I am happy to see that I am not the only person who likes to wear a harness.



It looks like Albert and Brian came up with a solution to one of the cable wrap problems, the outer table is now flat to ~40 mils. They did it by putting a thin radial slice in the table and using an angle bracket on the bottom to flatten the plate.





I did not believe I would see it, but Albert fits inside the base.


Dave and Marius are installing half of the Az Cable wrap. We got one side of the cable wrap in, but after it got installed, we discovered another problem, one we were warned we would see. The AZ wrap pulls away from the wall. We were hoping that the compressor cables would provide enough spring force to keep the az wrap along the wall, but it was not. The solution on the SZA was to use a "banana", you will just have to imagine how it works. Albert is checking with San Jose to see what they think.


In the meantime, we started worrying about the inbalance of the boom. There was an earliet problem with the elevation wheel slipping, so Al locked the elevation in place, and it has not been moved in a week. To see if we could bring it close, they hung 1500 lbs of counterwieght off the belly, and it got better, but it is still not totally there. Once again, San Jose is thinking about this.