As you may recall, we started the day like this:

A large project like this would not be possible without Our intrepid building crew, hard at work!

And here’s another pic of some more of our crew, trimuphant during their second full day of building:

By midday on the second day, we had put up 5 of the 21 segments, 6 of the 23 posts, 6 of the 32 pieces of acrylic. Didn’t feel like an auspicious start, and we were more than a little tense.

Various things contributed to this. We had made the design decision early on that each mirror would be married to two specific posts, and that any wiggle room would be provided by the mirrors’ ability to bend and the hinges. What this meant was that each of the mirrors had to be precisely fit to the posts to be bolted on. This involved a lot of heavy lifting and struggling. (We had only assembled 7 segments for demo day, at the burn was the first time we were going to assemble the whole thing.) This design decision was because we weren’t confident in our ability to precisely fabricate parts such that they would all be interchangeable (attaching hinges to posts is imprecise, drilling is imprecise, and acrylic can really only be drilled once or twice before it starts thinking about shattering.[1])

Another major contributor to this was our decision to avoid guy wires for wind and tipping stabilization of Mirror Blaze. Guy wires are a terrible tripping hazard, and they also look terrible. For many applications (like staking down a tent or yurt) they are basically essential, but we wanted to avoid them if at all possible.

We ended up drilling one foot deep holes in the base of each post, and using 2′ or 3′ rebar to stake them into the ground. As long as the wind didn’t lift the entire structure off the ground by a foot, we would be okay.

The last reason it took a long time to build was a decision I inadvertently made to start at one end of the outer wall. Had we gone both directions from the middle of the outer wall, we could have built two panels at once for much more of the build process.

But let none of this fool you. We were working with amazing people, building something, and enjoying ourselves in a way that’s difficult to describe:

S also took a moment for reflection[2]:

During our break for supper, we got to watch ‘A Unique Experience'[3] meet the guy with a capsaicin molecule tattooed to his arm:

Next up: Dancing with the builders in the pale moonlight!

[1]I learned this the hard way with my first drilling of holes in acrylic, but that was a half-thickness test piece, which I think contributed.

[2]No, I don’t think this will ever get old.

[3]M is known for offering ‘a unique experience’ which is usually tequila flavoured with some type of super-strong peppers that he’s grown. From the reactions of people who have tried it, it lives up to its name.