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two ten foot columns
Monday, August 1 2005
This evening after an obligation in Woodstock I got to work on the first structural elements for the platform that eventually will hold my as-yet-unbuilt solar heat collection array. These structural elements took the form of two ten and half foot long four by fours rising as columns from either side of the laboratory deck, designed to support the north end of the new platform. The south end of that platform will be supported by columns more than eight feet away, though those will have to rise from the complementary 45 degree surfaces of the laboratory's gabled roof. That's an inhospitable environment for carpentry, and I'm contemplating several different strategies for prefabricating deck support structures and then somehow moving them into position. All these complications are necessitated by the fact that the house's roof geometry is oriented 90 compass degrees from the way it would ideally be for maximal solar energy collection.
Of course, some of my elaborate pre-engineering is to make it easy for me to access and make adjustments to the solar collectors, which would be difficult without some sort of adjoining deck. And a big side effect of all this structural work is that I'm going to have a brand new place to put a lawn chair and look out over distant Shaupeneak Mountain and the depleted northern ruins of the Shawangunks along the eastern frontier of Hurley Township. I'll also see more of the crazy things that the sun does as it sets. From the ground all of those things are lost behind the trees to the west, but I can see over much of that vegetation from the rooftop.
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