The Foraging Begins.

Having decided that I was going to use recycled materials for the build I took an inventory of what I already had and then made a list of things I would need to acquire.

I had a lot of structural timber, certainly plenty to get the early phases of construction done from the dismantling of the Observatory mk 1.  The most obvious and urgent thing that was missing was the pier to mount the telescope on so I started visiting local scrap merchants and metal works looking for old pipes or unwanted off cuts but couldn't find what I was looking for.  I was just beginning to think that I might have to buy something new right at the start of the this project when I struck gold!

I was walking to work one morning when I noticed workmen pilling up signposts at the side of the road.   They were replacing redundant signage following an extensive project to reroute traffic through a local shopping area and there were half a dozen road sign poles just stacked there!  I asked one of the workmen what was planned for the poles and he pointed me to the site foreman, he in turn was amused and intrigued by my plans and donated the largest of the poles to my cause.  He even had one of the guys help me load it onto my car which was nice since there was no way I could lift the thing by myself!

Its amazing what people will give you when you ask nicely.

So that was it: the first crisis dealt with. Four metres of ideal steel pipe for free, its hard to do better than that!  We were now ready to get started with the build!