New project - Out of the attic !

[Astrokev]

With reference to my signature below, after about 18 years of being buried in the depths of the attic, yesterday I had a rush of motivation to dig out my old 6" Newtonian. This was home-made (bet you can't tell !) back in the 1980's and, as you can see, is looking a little worse for wear.

Originally, the scope was mounted on a home-made fork-equatorial mount. This explains the basis for the design - I wanted to keep the centre of gravity as close to the primary as possible to keep the fork arms short, so thought a skeleton tube may help reduce the tube weight above the dec axis. Not sure I achieved this as well as I wanted, but the open tube was fun to make and it worked.

Most of the build is basic stuff using simple hand tools, and can be gleaned from the pics, but just to explain a couple of details:-

The focusser is an old brass affair made by my dad in the early 1970's when I first got interested in astronomy. For this scope I thought it would be fun to try and add an electric drive to make for hands-free focussing. The drive you can see is made from an old video recorder motor and gearing. Not a complete success as the gearing was too course, but it worked after a fashion. Remember, this was in the old rack & pinon pre-Crayford days! I used micro-switches at each end of the draw tube to prevent it dropping out! The controls were on a hand-held box.

The aluminium arm on the dec axis is a tangent arm. This was attached to another small motor on the EQ mount and gave a small amount of dec adjustment via the same hand-held box. The focusser and tangent connections used a simple phone plug that was fed through the dec axis to allow for easy disconnection when dismantling/transporting (seen dangling out of the dec axis).

The dec bearings were wheel bearings off an old Triumph Spitfire and were as smooth as silk. Sadly, a bit rusty now!

My hope, when time allows, is to make a new closed tube and simple dob mount, to give me a small and portable scope for doing more ISS solar-transit imaging.

After ~20 years of neglect, the mirrors are filthy. May try and wash them and see how they perform before considering re-coating. They may be OK for solar imaging, since light gathering is not really a problem !

Hope this is of some interest.

Kevin

[Carbon Brush]

That is very humbling for those of us who buy scopes from shops and think drilling the tube for a different finder is an involved modification.

Good luck with the restoration & recovery.

[Gina]

Very interesting

Yes, good luck with it, and please post photos as you go Great project.

[Tom How]

Oh dear, I fear this may be partly my fault.

[MoonNut]

Fantastic! I love the "half binocular" finder, keep us all up to date with your progress.

[inksmithy]

That's the most inspiring thing I've seen for some time, I love it.

Alan

[Gina]

Me too!

[astroimpulse]

Subscribed

Very interesting

[Adamski]

Love it, also love the chopped up bino's as the finder scope. Very imaginitive.

[Astrokev]

Love it, also love the chopped up bino's as the finder scope. Very imaginitive.

Cheers for that. I wish I could say the finder worked. A really cheap pair of bins were sacrificed, so I guess it was never going to perform well!