My Sky Box telescope surround is no more, plus my block wall is damaged heavily. Heavy sustained winds 30-40mph persisted most of the day but my weather station recorded a high of 60.4 mph which did the damage. The sky box has handled 50+ mph before but in this instance one of the welds broke on a lower corner joint. I tried to band-aid it but to no avail. Once that first weld broke it setup a cascading effect and over a one hour period it crumpled up like a cheap suit.
The good news is my rig was safely tucked away in the man cave.
The sky box is on version 5 or 6, can't remember precisely but version 7 will be bullet proof. I'm going to rebuild it and make the tarps roll down easily, er fairly easily The previous version I had the tarps fastened to the frame by stainless steel zip ties. Though they worked great they weren't removable and that's where Sky Box V6 fell on its face.
I'm going to use the stainless steel zips on the bottom edge of each tarp and bungee cords on the other three sides. When the next wind storm arrives I'll just remove the bungees and roll the tarps down to the bottom of the frame and wrap the tarps with said bungees.
If anyone has a better idea I'm all ears. BTW, the bungees are the kind that are fairly small and have a ball on one end.
I originally wanted to install a dome but the HOA nixed that idea. So after carefully reading the CC&R's I discovered that structures that aren't permanent were allowed. So in a sense I stuck it to the HOA by installing my ugly Sky Box vs the more elegant but permanent dome. In that sense it tickles me pink.
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