Last week the electrical team finished straight pieces for the cable runs up the side of the telescope and have to purchase the transition curved pieces to finish the cableways. Weathers Electric started work on the improvements we require for the new tracker. This is likely to take 4-6 weeks but they made some progress outside with the conduit. Veliez construction was on site over the weekend cutting concrete paths for the glycol, liquid nitrogen, power etc.. They finished their concrete cuts. We had our Board of Directors meeting this past weekend and they had a chance to see all of our progress in the Wide Field Upgrade. The next board meeting will be in June also out at McDonald so that they can see the completed Wide Field Upgrade.

This week we will be finishing the weldments and then painting them. Weathers electric will continue work on site, mostly on the outside conduit. Veliez construction will be back on site later in the week to jack-hammer out the concrete cuts and then line and level the trenches. They hope to finish that effort this next weekend.

In the past week we had a very significant power outage caused by a large snow/ice storm. The outage lasted from Saturday Nov 23 until Tuesday Nov 26. The next day was spent getting all of our subsystems back up and checked. Thankfully no permanent damage was found to the facility but this has put us about 3 days behind schedule for all activities.

Since the last blog posting we have gotten a start on a number of projects high up on the tracker including: mounting the lower X work platform and handrails, modification of the lower and upper X screw weldments, welding on the lower X cable tray brackets, positioning of the lower and upper X screw mount weldments.

This week we will be welding on the upper hex weldments and installing the DAS-box weldments. When the JLG manlift is not in use by the welding team the electrical team will be installing the cable trays up the side of the structure or rearranging the azimuth cable wrap.

We also have Weathers Electric and Veliz Construction on site setting up power to the lower electrical room and cutting slots in the dome floor for the additional glycol, power, nitrogen and liquid nitrogen lines.

A very busy week….. Just in time for our Board of Directors meeting this weekend.

Last week the certified welders finished up work on the X-rail stiffener and the supports for the lower X work platform. Logan was able to strip the M4 witness sample with a fairly simple Greenriver solution.

This week we will have our local welders finish up with the tracker weldments. We will also be working on the cable trays that lead from the cable wrap up the telescope structure toward the tracker.

While working on the alignment of the corrector at UA, out team found that the coating on M4 (and a few of the witness samples that came with it) was beginning to have signs of coating failure, bubbling and spotting. Our current plan is to send the witness samples to McDonald so that we can confirm the stripping process for this very tough coating and then send that witness back to UA so that they can confirm that the witness has not been damaged. Meanwhile UA will continue to work on the corrector alignment with M4. If all goes well we will then strip the coating from M4 and send it to be recoated once they have all alignment issues worked out. The question remains about who will do the recoating.

We hope to act quickly and get M4 back to UA for final alignment before shipping to McDonald in the spring.

So far this does not pose an imminent threat to the WFU schedule.

Last week we finished up the metrology measurements of the upper hex and all of the cableways in the lower electrical room and spectrograph room.

This week we will have welders on site working on the channels for the lower X stiffener and also the new work platform for the outside of lower X. We are also taking apart the MRS enclosure for storage, reshelving the Az cable wrap and installing static cable wrap. We continue to be on schedule.