GALAXY update: Almost there!

Yesterday evening I met GALAXY Chief Engineer Turff at our friend Craig’s estate to test our skills at laying out and setting up GALAXY. Spoiler alert: The piece is something else.

I must applaud Turff at this point for doing 90% of the work on this piece. All the cables and boxes you see have been wired/soldered/connected by him with a minimum of assistance from me or the ragtag team of helpers.

As Turff said, “A GALAXY in a box.”

The process was definitely an ABORTIVE ATTEMPT: We had some ideas about organization and flow, but mostly the evening was a test of those presumptions. For example, do we plop down all the junction boxes (the little white ones) first, guessing at the distance and correcting later with SUCCESSIVE APPROXIMATION? Or do we lay out and connect Zone 1 first and proceed from there?

NOTE: There are seven Zones. Each Zone has a power box and four junction boxes. Each junction box connects/powers seven rings.

Yes, it rapidly becomes confusing. You may recall my plan to lessen that confusion with my color-coded “recipe cards”:

The idea is that the arrow points back along the line to the center, and the rings are listed by size. The bundle is tied with matching colored ties, numbered. There are also the wire stands, bundled by zone/box.

At any rate, we decided to go ahead and drop the junction boxes in an approximation of where they should go, knowing we’d have to move them as we began laying out the rings.

Zone 1 completed and lit. It was as exciting as you might think, even though we had already set up Zone 1 on the Lichtenbergian Retreat in August.

It became my task to start putting the rings on their stands. You may recall that the design calls for the rings to be elevated because the project’s intended home, the middle of Alchemy, is known as Lake Ruby for its tendency to flood with even light rain.

There was one heart-stopping moment when Zone 3 wouldn’t light up…

… but expert troubleshooting by Chief Engineer Turff resolved the issue. (It was a ring that had shorted out.)

The supports for the rings are not everything I had hoped for, but they’ll do. However, by the time I finished setting up Zone 1 the dark was upon us. Since we’re not going to be dealing with flooding at Greenville St Park, I made the executive decision to leave well enough alone in the moment, and not to install the supports on Sat.

And finally we were done.

We know we have spacing issues to resolve, but holy-moly is this thing gobsmacking or what? As we said last night, the hippies at the burn are going to wet their pants when we finally get to burn again — and how do we explain the genesis of this trippy project to the good townspeople of Newnan who have gathered next Sat?

Of course, then, in the cold and the dark, we had to take it all down, keeping it organized as we went. Time to call for the teams to assemble to assist us next weekend!