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hello folks! well the clouds have moved out for a few hours so i think it's time for a test! keep your fingers crossed.

hello folks! ok so. rebuild went well. so far i'm happy with it. had to rework the mirror cell ( broke in shipping ) still a few things left to do. took it out for a look at jup. it did very well! but here's is the basic results.

right. i went ahead and got a sonotube and doing a whole rebuild. if i'm reading it right the "newt for the web" said it's good. if not i'll get a new tube and learn some more hahaha. good project to play with though! thanks for the help! i understand the mechanics, putting them into practice is another thing all together!

thank you very much Andrew! that's what i've been looking for. seems it's fine. i should have a diagonal obstruction of 18% which is under the 20% they want. the obstruction of the primary surface area by the diagonal is 3% so all good!

thank you very much! this had me scratching my head. lol. the difference was 1.25 inches. not a huge difference but enough i thought it wiser to ask.

hello folks! i just desided to upgrade an olde 6" F8 dob and need some advice on placing the focuser. i am going from a helical to a crayford focuser. and the new crayford's profile is a good bit higher than the old focuser. ( see pic) should i shorten the distance the same amount as the difference between the two? and if so, will this mean i need a larger secondary? thanks for any help i can get on this. Rick

thats a handy piece of information! thank you. i will have it recoated it has a couple of spots i'd rather not be there. found a cell and spider for it. thinking about a 10:1 focuser as well. going to be almost a complete rebuild but it's woth it!

never understood that. seems the quality would be equal across the market, maybe i don't understand world markets IDK just seems odd to me.

indeed. i'm really looking forward to using this one for a very long time.

thanks John! and yes sir. i did some reading and it turns out these were made by discovery early on for orion "pre china" and over seen by Terry Ostahowski, so everyone seems to give them an excellent rating. (for a factory produced mirror) i think it's going to be a fun project to upgrade! Rick

hello folks! my brother in law expressed interest in viewing so a couple of years ago i got him an old orion 6" dob, deep space explorer for christmass, he loved it! but i knew it was a bit of a pain to use and got him a zhumell 8" i found at a pretty good price. well of course he loved that even better, and i wound up with the 6" back. i use an old orange tube C8 and and think it's awesome! but i collimated the 6" (best i could with that secondary) and WOW! this is a great little scope! jup, a was great at 80X detail was way more than i expected for this little dob! so much so i'm thinking of rebuilding it and keeping it myself! so did i just get lucky with the optics or were these built that good? Rick

hello folks! been a while. been some year huh?! lol. went about as far as I could go with the 79 model C8 fork mount. (just to unstable) so a fella sold me his skyview pro GT! yay!! I had to buy a dovetail plate for it and MAN! things are tuff to get in this mess. everythings back ordered! but I finely got it in just to find out I needed radius blocks! GRRRRR! I shopped for about 2 days before I got tired of fooling with it, drilled and tapped it my self! (cringe) lol. but it's up and running great! the SVP is soooo much better than the fork mount it came with, now about these clouds!...……….