My little Russian Newtonian.

[Chaz2b]

Having acquired from my late friend and owner of SCSastro, a Russian Newtonian 4” ish! I decided to have a peek in the box it came in. This box I can only describe as being built by a Russian lumberjack! It’s over built to say the least. The interior was covered with a non setting lacquer, yuk! It sticks to everything.

Removing the items, it’s an all in one kit, there’s the pilar mount, the scope itself, 25mm eyepiece, four filters and couple of tools. Now, this mount is horrible to assemble, has tacky substance from the box over it, and the control handles are broken plus one tube cradle is missing.

What’s different about this Newtonian compared to all the others I have had, is it has bottom cover as well as the top cover, neat! The star finder is a bit of a novelty, it’s built into the eyepiece holder and to use it you pull it out, this then blocks the secondary but you don’t need to move your head to align it with your target object.

The mirrors are blemish free, considering it’s been in its box since 1994 that’s not bad!

So far I’ve only looked through it terrestrial and it’s as good as any other Newtonian I’ve looked through this way. I’ve now ordered some tube rings so I can mount it properly and give it its first ( it’s a virgin! ) star light. I’ll add to this my findings when that happens.

chaz

 

Edited June 15, 2022 by Chaz2b
Added photo

[DaveL59]

it's a great little scope, the TAL-M and gives good views. I've even accidentally forgot to pull the finder out and was running higer mag via it and was surprised how well that even showed 🙂

The one I picked up was in poor shape, paint-wise and had some rock in the mount, now sorted. The refurb thread I did for it is here

Does yours also have the extension tube for the eyepiece? Mine didn't so I fab'd one using acrylic tube and that worked very nicely on Jupiter and Saturn with the extra magnification being very usable.

Sounds like you may also be missing the K15 eyepiece, mine was missing the 25mm funnily enough. I do have a spare 15mm, let me know if you need it.

Edited June 15, 2022 by DaveL59

[Chaz2b]

I’ve just had a looooong look through your refurb of yours, wow! Excellent, but until I can find replacement parts mine will stay in its box, and that’ll need refurbing too! To get rid of that horrible lacquer.🤩

chaz

[DaveL59]

15 minutes ago, Chaz2b said:

I’ve just had a looooong look through your refurb of yours, wow! Excellent, but until I can find replacement parts mine will stay in its box, and that’ll need refurbing too! To get rid of that horrible lacquer.🤩

chaz

yeah that's odd as mine isn't like that apart from one area where the PO may have spilt something (juice or something). I replaced the foam in the box with felt tho as it was pretty shot.

What parts are you missing?

and yeah, sorry about the length of that thread 😛 

[Chaz2b]

No sorries required, it was a good read. As mentioned above, one tube cradle is missing.

 Both locking handles are broken probably as a misunderstanding of what they were for and tried shifting them as a result…snap.

There were no extensions either, but as I’ve a 3D printer I could probably sort that.
That interior will need a lot of sorting to remove the unset lacquer , not looking forward to that, might gloss over it.

chaz

[DaveL59]

ahh, probably read the post before you edited it lol.

Shame about the broken bits, those clamp screws for the axes are awkward as the thread is narrow compared to the main body of the shaft tho it might be possible to make something using threaded stand-offs if you can fine any to match the thread.

The tube rings are harder as you'd have to either repair what's there or custom make. By the way you have a TAL100? I was able to hang my 100RS off that wee TAL-M mount tho it is somewhat too long/heavy so it'd likely fit into the same rings on your other TAL mount... worth a look 🙂