How do you turn a fork mount into a dovetail mount?

[daslolo]

I see threads on deforking an OTA but I'm curious about dovetailing a Nexstar 11 fork.

Has anyone done it?

[RT65CB-SWL]

Hi @daslolo and a late welcome to SGL. 

Have you seen/watched this? --->

It is presented by 'uncle' Rod Mollise... 'The Godfather' of SCT projects & mods. 

[daslolo]

3 minutes ago, Philip R said:

Hi @daslolo and a late welcome to SGL. 

 

thanks mate!

4 minutes ago, Philip R said:

Have you seen/watched this

yes, it's about deforking, what i want is dovetailing that fork mount, to put other otas on it

[1parsec]

Hi, 
One difficulty will be the space available between the 2 forks.  
You'd need to mount a saddle to each fork and then 2 dovetail bars to the OTA. 
This would mean with out some clever design and machined parts (expensive) the original OTA won't fit in the resulting gap.
Maintaining orthogonality and ensuring the rotational centers of the 2 saddles, and parallelism and squareness of the dovetail bars on the different OTA's will need careful consideration too !

 

[Cosmic Geoff]

On 11/03/2020 at 13:02, daslolo said:

yes, it's about deforking, what i want is dovetailing that fork mount, to put other otas on it

Not sure exactly what you want to achieve. You could piggyback a scope of substantial size on top of the fork-mounted C11. Considering the size and weight of the assembly it will just shrug off the weight of a smaller scope.

Is the C11 permanently mounted in an observatory?