9x50 Finderscope Cross-Hair repair

[DeanSL]

Let me start by saying, I am no engineer,this may be an obviously easy repair and I may be the only person ever to need to repair them, but I thought i would share the repair!

My recently purchased telescope's finderscope had what i initially thought was loose hair in it, until I found out it was supposed to have cross-hairs! After initially think I could do without I thought about seeing if it was glued up or screwed up, luckily it seems that things are still made using threads rather than glue and I had soon unscrewed the eyepiece end

Only a gentle nudge with a flat headed screwdriver got the small threaded disc that the cross-hairs are stuck to turning, I unscrewed it by hand, be careful not to turn it upside down or the lenses may fall out! (This picture was taken after the repair!)

I used a scalpel to remove the broken cross-hairs and clean up the area where they were attached. Luckily there are small grooves in this disc to help align the cross-hairs. For the cross-hairs I had a search on the internet and one recommendation was the fine copper wire in the in-ear headphone leads, although I didn't have any of these I did have various broken iPod charging cables. I stripped these back and used the wire from these, visually they seemed the same thickness as the ones I was replacing. I taped the wires down flat over the small grooves to make a cross, I then added more tape nearer to the disc to increase the tension. Finally I used my daughters false nail superglue to adhere the wire to the disc.

A few minutes later I trimmed the excess and screwed it all back together, job done!

[DeanSL]

Here's the completed Finderscope

[Peter Drew]

Human hair is a good source of crosshair material. I have a bald patch as proof!  :smiley:

[DeanSL]

He He , I'm going the same way. I have used my other halves hair on models before, I also read that spider silk can be used.

[Ruud]

Problem solved, and a great solution it is.

[Ajohn]

Low breaking strain fishing line too but I've never had to do it.

I wanted a cross hair eyepiece for aligning a scope so bought a Chinese 10x microscope objective with cross hairs- Ebay. I will need to turn up a sleeve to convert it to 1 1/4. For the price I was surprised by the quality. It's an eyepiece for a compound rather than a stereo microscope so the field of view is limited to  around 16mm.  Focal length 250mm / magnification so 25mm in my case.  They have an accurate scale on one of the axis so it might be possible to use them for polar alignment. I didn't fancy the price of the astro ones for the amount of use it will have.

John

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[callump]

I made a very successful finder using a pin rather than cross-hairs. The tip of the pin (or needle) is placed at the center, and in use it does not obscure the object you're aligning on (if you get my point :-)

/callump

[Ajohn]

 A sharp idea callump, straight to the point. I like that.

John

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[Mark - Coventry]

I've just received a second-hand finder scope with one broken cross hair. I was worried about taking it apart and fatally damaging it but this is a great solution. Thanks!