Starflyer

You have a PM sir.

I've dug out a few bits n bobs that aren't being used. BST Explorer 8mm ED eyepiece - £20 Laser cut stainless steel (painted) Bhatinov mask for WO ZS 66, may fit other scopes, approx 85mm between the holding tabs - £8 Laser cut stainless steel (painted) Bhatinov mask for WO ZS 80, may fit other scopes, approx 105mm between the holding tabs - £8 Cheshire Collimating Eyepiece - £15 Farpoint Astro 2" Collimating Eyepeice (this was an early one, before they started engraving their name on it) - £20 HitecAstro EQDIR adapter (including 3m USB extension cable) for EQMOD, for EQ5 PRO, HEQ5 Syntrek & PRO, AZ EQ5-GT, AZ EQ6-GT, EQ8. This is the Prolific chipset version and worked flawlessly with my windows 7 laptop but I can't get it to play with my new windows 10 laptop - £12 A Maplins aluminium case (foam already plucked to accept eyepieces) - £12 A large, heavy duty (57 x 40 x 25cm) grey plastic case with latches (no foam) - £20 Cheers, Ian

Here's a couple of mine from a few years back, I moved to OAG so no need for a guide scope now.

Just happened across this thread, there's a lot of beautiful dobs here. Mine may not be huge but I love it

Hi Chris, You drill the holes, blow out all the dust with a bicycle pump, half fill with the supplied epoxy resin, wind the bolts into the resin to the bottom of the hole and smooth out any extra that comes out of the top of the hole. It set rock hard within about 15 minutes, but I left it 24 hours before bolting the whole thing down. I had too much bolt sticking out after it was finished so had to cut some off, if I did it again I'd drill down another 20mm. Glad you like it. I'm so happy with the design I may well get a few more made for sale on ABS. Cheers, Ian

Another month and another progress report; the turf was re-laid and is recovering well, and the mount was fixed to the pier using a lovely anodised adapter from ebay. I managed to get first light last week, I spent an hour drift aligning and the benefits of using a pier were evident immediately. This thing is rock solid, I had the best guiding I've ever seen at 1200mm focal length This is the Crescent Nebula, 50 minutes in Ha under an almost full moon.

Here's a few pics of the pier. I've got a few jobs to finish; cut the excess of the bolts off, fit the pier adapter, fill the remains of the hole with topsoil and re-lay the turf I removed originally. The plan is to to have a twelve inch circle of pea gravel around it and the rest back as it was. Cheers, Ian

Sorry for the late reply, I came back here to post an update and saw your question. The pier was made up by a friend of mine who's a steel fabricator and I'm really really pleased with it. It's six inch tube with a wall thickness of 5mm with the plates made from laser cut 10mm steel and M16 stainless threaded bars. All of the steel work was galvanised and then powder coated so it should outlast me. I'd thought of doing this but didn't have the pier to make a template for the bolts and I wanted to get the concrete in so it had a couple of weeks to cure and dry out a bit before I started drilling into it. If I did it again I'd get the laser cutters to make me a template Cheers, Ian

I thought I'd share a few pics of my pier installation. It's just a concrete slab at the moment but the pier should be finished and ready to be bolted down in a couple of weeks. Does anyone have a cheap source of chemical anchors? I found this kit on eBay, does this look okay, or are their cheaper / better options out there?

On my old Orion Optics 10" newt the tube opening was so tight that if I didn't use the offset then one side of the tube opening was always more visible that the other when collimating. It was clearly visible in my flat frames as a darker area, so with narrow tubes you really should offset the secondary.

I've owned one of these for about 18 months now and below is my experience. It arrived with a significant amount of DEC backlash, not just a bit but enough that I could rock the DEC axis back and forth. I've adjusted it out now and it guides well in both RA and DEC. It wasn't difficult to do but shouldn't have been like this out of the box. The thread on the altitude adjuster is far too course and the side handwheel nuts to lock the altitude axis do almost nothing to lock it in place. I added leather washers underneath the handwheel nuts and they now hold the altitude axis firmly. I can't do anything about the altitude adjuster without resorting to having one made and it's more an annoyance than a show stopper so I live with it now. A finer thread would allow accurate PA to be achieved in less time while drift aligning, at the moment I find myself often overshooting the sweet spot, even with the finest of touches. Out of the box the eyepiece on the polarscope rocked back and forth around half of its FOV, the thread fit between the two parts was terrible and initially any sort of half accurate polar alignment was impossible. I eventually added some PTFE tape to the threads, realigned the polarscope reticle and now it works very well, however the PTFE tape is breaking up and has started leaving particles all over the reticle. The RA clutch bolt bent within the first couple of uses and after reading reports of them snapping on SGL I replaced it with a stainless bolt. Am I happy with it? I was initially very disappointed; out of the box it was a pig to use and it almost put me off imaging completely. I'm happier now I've got it tuned but I can see how these QC issues would immediately put other people off for good or cause them to fiddle and cause additional problems. I guess 'you get what you pay for' holds true at this level too, this is certainly a lot of mount for the money but with a little bit of extra care and attention to detail this mount could have been a game changer. Synta have gone some way to addressing the 'standard' EQ6 Pro problems but IMO have stopped just short of making an outstanding mount. Cheers, Ian