Building roof mount

Working model for attaching the telescope mount to the side of a clearstory structure on the roof. We would attach brackets from the angle iron to the wall. This would look similar to the attachment method used on the existing antennae that occupies the other other corner of the clearstory.

#Process:

We used scrap metal to make our dish mount. We started by cleaning the metal and cutting it to size.

We plasma cut a 1.5' x 3' rectangle of 5 gauge steel (about 3/16" thick, it later turned out this is to thin) and cleaned up the edges with a grinder.

We cut an 11.5' length of 2.5" (exterior diameter) pipe and cleaned it using a steel brush head on a hand held grinder.

We then MIG welded the pipe to the plate. We reinforced the weld with a two extra beads because most of the force in the system will be directed to this point.

The real trick was getting the pipe perpendicular to the plate.

We ended up clamping the plate on one side of a long table and then using the corner of the table as a perpendicular straight edge in two dimensions.

After some tests we realized the weight of the pipe was warping the plate so we successfully reinforced it with some angle iron.