RNH Roof Report: October 15, 2024

Last Sunday Phil Baker/VE7BPH, Dave Hadley/VA7HDY, Tony Rizzi and Peter Rizzi/jVE7RZZ met at Peter’s QTH to make the trek up to RNH to reinforce a sagging roof.  Murphy eased his nose into the plans which required a modification to the telepoles before we could leave.  Steel plates had to be cut and welded onto the teleposts so that a piece of plywood could be attached to the top of the post and at the bottom so it could be secured to a 6″x6″ post that sat on the floor.  Check the pictures.  Once that was done we were able to get underway for what was a two hour drive up to Granite Peak with two pickup trucks loaded with teleposts, 6×6 timbers, two 45-gallon drums of emulsion, to seal the roof surface, and all the tools needed to get the job done. The road up to Granite Peak has not been maintained for some time so was rough to very rough once we left the pavement.  Twenty KPH was moving quickly.

Once on site the work began.  Phil hooked a computer up to the repeater and did some programming on that – note that it is giving the correct time now.  Some measurements were made to get the height of the ceiling so that the 6×6 timbers could be cut to the right length to make up the difference between the length of the teleposts and the height of the ceiling.  A two foot square plywood pad was attached to the top of the telepost which was set on a metal pad on the timber post.  Once we had a base attached to the timber post we were able to start “raising the roof”.  With four of these supports in place we raised the roof about four to six inches to get rid of the sag in it and put a bit of a crown in it.

Once the roof was reinforced and leveled up we could start pumping emulsion from the drums up onto the roof.  Not quite.  Murphy showed up again.  After a couple of gallons of emulsion we had two pumps fail, probably because the emulsion was cool and a little thick.  Well time was getting on and there was a Thanksgiving dinner waiting so the barrels of emulsion were offloaded from the truck and we packed up and left the emulsion for another day.  Peter is going to get a more “scookum” pump and there will be another trip up to RNH to seal the roof before the snow flies.