Forward progress

It's Saturday morning here.  Time for a new post. Thanks to everyone who has sent comments. It helps motivate me to write more. 

It is back to feeling like Antarctica here.  Temperatures are in the single digits (F) with wind chills in the negative teens. I don't mind the cold but the wind is wicked.  The breeze gets into every available chink in my usually-warm armor.

I have been really busy the last couple days making "forward progress" (our PIs favorite way of describing the focus of the day's activities) on the panels discussed in earlier posts. I have made my peace with them, even though we had to redrill new holes for nearly every screw.  It is just a matter of adjusting expectations.  The process was to mount the panels by placing them in the intended location and then making the best of a bad job of locating holes by drilling and tapping new ones, then applying a very shiny tape made of teflon coated silver.  This tape reflects the sunlight at float altitude, where the Sun's radiant energy is far more potent than it is at the Earth's surface after it has been filtered by the atmosphere.

Happy shiny panels

As you can see, I really put my back into my work. My job was to hold the panels up against the bottom of the instrument while Michael drilled and screwed.  The hard hats were to keep our skulls from getting ripped open if we were to scrape them up against the underside of the panels where various scraps of sheet metal were hanging down after being cut to make room for boltheads.

Today I do follow up work with the panels. Now we go and cover every screwhead with the same shiny tape.  We still have 5 side panels without tape on them. And then the instrument frame gets tapes as well.  You can see how nice and shiny the bottom is now.

Sanity check

All this effort has been keeping me so busy that I have not been keeping up this blog as faithfully as I would like.  Instead, I have been taking a little time at the end of each day to relax with my guitar.  Occasionally an impromptu jam session arises among the four guitarists out here, and it can get a little noisy in the hangar past 4:30 pm.