A Busy Day

We got an early start and accomplished a lot today, ably assisted by a friend (thanks, Phil!!) who came for a couple of hours to help with the heavy lifting part - tilting the jacquard frame up onto its feet and bolting it to the wood frame. Sounds easy and quick; in practice, not so much.



Then DH spent some time leveling the feet of the jacquard frame - sort of like leveling a refrigerator, only heavier!



Then we began hanging the jacquard modules from the frame and connecting the lifting cables to the pulleys overhead. It's like anything complicated, you do it one step at a time. Here's the first module in place:



I won't bore you with pictures of each module going up, instead I'll just cut to the chase. Here's the frame with all 8 modules in place:



After that, things seemed to go fairly quickly. The next step was connecting the birds' nest of cables - one power cable and one data cable for each of the modules. At first, it looked a right mess:



Which was gradually tamed with cable ties, first securing the cables to their respective modules in a tidy way, then routing them overhead to a handy "cable routing bar:"



After the cables, we began to install the fun stuff, like beams:



And crossmembers with nameplates:



And now I need a drink, some ibuprofen, dinner, and a soak in the hot tub. In that order! More progress tomorrow.......