Teflon Sliders

[Holliday]

Am in the process of modding my Dob with setting cirlces and replacing the teflon sliders.

I've read Fantastic Plastic is a decent place on ebay for sheets but at the moment it says it's closed until the 1st of August.

So another popular replacement seems to be furniture glides. Does anyone know some decent ones, preferably in a high-street shop since I would like to get them tomorrow.

Cheers!

[Doc]

B&Q do them. Have never used them but the Americans use them alot.

[catburglar]

I tried the furniture glides from B&Q- they were certainly a bit slippier than the samll (approx 1 inch) squares of teflon that were used on my flextube 250.

However there were two problems using them:

1. they were also much thicker than the original teflon pads the first minor problem was that it took a bit of fiddling and trial and error with central bolts and sleeves to make sure the scope rotated rather than translated when it was pushed. This was a little disconcerting without being really troublesome.

2. the azimuth motion was much smoother than the altitude motion which made it difficult to track smoothly- I never did sort this one to my satisfaction- a really slick altitude axis meant tube balance was more critical so I ended up fiddling with the altitude tension adjustment.

[Holliday]

Well just got some from B&Q, whacked all 4 on the base and I can't say that i'm that impressed. I'm not sure if I should have only used 3 or spaced them differently but the motion is very sticky, takes a lot more force to get it rotating than the previous pads and is quite a bit less smooth.

[Doc]

Don't you have to roughen them up a bit so to make them less smooth

[Holliday]

Don't you have to roughen them up a bit so to make them less smooth

Now it's getting confusing So making their surface less smooth with a bit of fine sandpaper would make them a little easier to rotate my base upon?

[Doc]

Yes

The smoother they are the more stiction they have.

[yeti monster]

I use a dry silicon lubricant, specifically for PTFE. It reduces stiction and also doesn't encourage the picking up of contamination, which will add friction where it isn't wanted.