New World Datsuns...

Well I made the real mirror cell and new plastic arms, I like the wood ones better.







It's a lot nicer now, everything works as it should so far.

I think I am going to dump the plywood box and make a metal cage, but that will make the truss poles harder to deal with, need to think about it.

This is where I am now, the mirror box it too small now, but I was not going to use this one anyway, I am mocking stuff up to see what will work.



I planned on holding the truss tubes in with this under what I used, but this was the only one that did not fall apart, cheap plywood.



The mirror does actually fit in there, but it needs to be a slightly bigger box.

Here is what it looks like now.



I have not cut the tubes yet, I need some other stuff like a secondary mirror holder/mirror, I need to make spiders but need the secondary to do that, I measured stuff out and sitting on the ground like it is in the photo the focus mechanism would be eye height, and that is without the mount, so I need to make something low profile.

I have decided to do away with the wood mirror box, it weighed a lot and the plywood was falling apart, even though I could buy way better plywood I decided to make a mirror cell holder out of metal, so far it is way better and I made it larger, it was 18.5" square, now it is around 20.5" square and it weighs less, everything you see in the photo below weighs only 35 pounds.



Here is the new mirror cell holder.



Here is a broken truss tube mount bracket, I am going to try another design tomorrow that should make it way easier to put together, it should make it easier to put together is the part I am not totally sure about yet, it could make it harder to put together another way.

Well it is looking more and more like a telescope everyday, I made the side bearings using my drill press and a jig so I could rotate the piece of plywood and make a perfect half circle.



Then I made a base to set the telescope assembly in.





Here it is before I made the turn table out of the base.



And here is the base with the bearing installed that allows me to turn it 360 degrees.







I made another smaller upper tube assembly(UTA), it is lighter and made of black plastic instead of blue plastic.



And here are the new UTA rings I will use to make my good UTA.



As I said before I am mocking this stuff up to see if it will work, once I get it done I will need to take it all apart and stain it to make it waterproof, but I will only do that as long as I am not going to be drilling any new holes, so everything has to be mounted/put together as it will be when in use, I also need to paint all the metal parts black or cover them with black, I will be looking for heat shrink for the truss poles but before I do all that I need to find a secondary housing/mirror and make the spiders to hold it so I know what length the truss poles need to be.

I made some progress since last time I posted, the Teflon came today so I put that on the scope and now it turns and raises ans lowers much easier.



Then I did the base, there are 24 3/4" squares of Teflon held on with my air staple gun like what was used to hold the side bearing pieces in place, I also put a center piece in.



Then the plastic circle with the textured side down resting on the Teflon.



Then the base on top of the plastic circle, I did not staple the circle to the bottom of the base as I do not think it needs it as it has enough friction to stay glued to the bottom of the base box, whenever I turn the scope the plastic rides on the Teflon.



It only takes 10 ounces to get it turning and it takes 10 ounces to keep it turning, so it is not sticking which is what you do not want it to do as if it sticks when you try to move the scope and it gives all at once you lose what you are trying to look at, you want it to move smoothly and not stick.



I am getting to the point where I need a secondary holder and secondary mirror, once they are installed I can install the focus mechanism where it needs to be and then I can cut the truss tubes to the proper length, it will then be ready to test.

Do you have any official plans you are going off of? Or just kinda winging it off of other designs?

Ive never worked with solid teflon, no idea you could just staple it.

I am just making it up as I go, but I look at scopes others have made and get ideas or copy their ideas, sometimes I come up with stuff on my own, but usually I get told something will not work that way and I figure out how to make it work.
I have been told that them 24 squares I used in the base will not work, it was suggested I take out all but 3 of them over the legs, but that is one of the things I have done that has worked flawlessly so far on the first try.
That Teflon is only a 1/16" and 1/8" thick, it is more flexible and softer than plastic, but feels like plastic and it is heavy for its size, it also is kinda expensive, but ebay has lots of sellers so it can be found for a reasonable price in smaller pieces like the 12" X 12" sheets I ordered if you consider $20. to $30. cheap.
What is really strange to me is that white plastic ring/disc I used has a textured side and a smooth side, the Teflon sticks to the smooth side and slides easily on the textured side when I rub a piece of Teflon on it, same with Formica, Teflon slips better on textured Formica than it does on smooth Formica, I was going to try the plastic to see if it would work and it did, Formica cannot be bought in large sheets at HD or Lowes as i asked while I was there picking up the Maple plywood, I have more money into plastic knobs and SS threaded screws/nuts than I do into anything else except the primary mirror.

I decided to make a slightly larger scope than I already have because the Nova Mirror on my Starsplitter is going to need re-coated and I wanted something to look thru other than that 10" scope I will likely sell, you see the longer the focal length(how tall the scope is), the larger what I am looking at will be using the same eyepiece, and this one will be less than half the weight of the Starsplitter(easier to transport) even though it is going to be a foot taller, this is being built lighter so I can easily deal with it, that Starsplitter mirror box is very heavy, that is why it has wheel barrow wheels to move it around even when taken apart, the drawback is this scope can be blown or knocked over easily as it is light.
There are some out there that have scopes that weigh less than 60lbs completely put together that are as large or larger than mine is going to be, mine is likely going to be around a 100lbs total, maybe a little less, right now the scope weighs 65lbs in the photo below and I will cut holes in the wood side bearings to make them lighter.

I also added some side bearing bracing a couple days ago, I made my own compression fittings to hold the coupler nut in place in the tubes.







Here the braces are installed onto the side bearings.

Well done , impressed

This project has stalled from lack of parts(secondary holder/mirror), in a little over a week a guy on the telescope forum is supposed to get home and give me some specifics on a 3.1" secondary holder and mirror i believe, until then I am stalled.
I can make the spiders to hold the secondary, but I need the secondary holder to know what kind of spiders I need to make, it's a frank'n scope made out of whatever I can find and think of to make out of what is around here.

Back on January 2 I did a very precise collimation on my telescope with the green curtain around the middle, I did everything and i did so good of a job I removed offset that it is supposed to have, offset is kinda like a purposely made error in the building of telescopes, I got everything so perfect I almost completely removed the offset, the experts on the forum(some believe they know more about this subject than most everyone else in the world know) have looked at my collimation photos I take(precise angled photos) and put them in their simulators they have worked up with different colored circles and then tell me my collimation is near perfect but where did the offset go???
In the end they are saying it appears to be collimated well and don't worry about it until you get the Litepipe made for your telescope that i bought a couple days ago as i have the wrong one for my scope and then we will know what happened, so I will not know how I screwed it up until this coming weekend if the tool arrives Saturday like it is supposed to.

I was looking to buy some C cell batteries today and they want over $2.00 each for the damned things at Winco, I have a lot of double A batteries(AA), so I made them work, they are all 1.5 volt so what is the difference except the size, I made them larger and they work just fine in my invisible wall/lighthouse for my Roomba floor cleaners.

I learn new telescope stuff everyday, I have an issue with the tools I am buying to collimate telescope, I bought a used 2" Litepipe that is supposed to be the one for my telescope, this Litepipe is made to help collimate/align the telescope mirrors, whenever I would post a photo for the experts to analyze I would get replies back asking me to do this or that so they could see what they wanted to see, I could barely see what they were asking for but could not get it to show up in a photo, I will explain it one way and then another, when my focus assembly is racked all the way in meaning it puts the eyepiece as close to the scope tube/assembly as possible(it does not stick out very far) I could see the mirror clips they all wanted to see, now one would think if I racked the focuser out(sticks out a long ways from the telescope) that I would be able to see what they were asking for but that is not the case, if I even rack it out a little I cannot see the mirror clips anymore and this is why, I did not get this concept until I thought about it, here it is, if you have a piece of paper with a hole in it maybe an inch round, if you put your eye right in front of the hole as close as you can you can see a lot in front of you, like 90 degrees to the sides, now if you start slowly backing off from the hole but keep looking thru the hole what you can see gets less and less to the point where it looks like you are looking thru a small straw, well this is how my telescope works, when ever I would rack it out I could not even see the clips myself, so I tried something, I took everything out of the focuser and stuck my eye right in the hole as deep as I could get it, I could see all the clips holding the mirror in place in the secondary mirror, then I started backing up, at just over 4' away all i could see was the secondary reflection of the secondary in the secondary mirror, the farther I moved back the less I could see of the primary mirror, now this concept I can understand, but then I understood what my issue was, my secondary mirror is not big enough to collect all the light from my primary mirror, it's like I have a 12" primary mirror instead of a 14.5" primary mirror.

OK, so what I determined from this is that my telescope was made to look at planets using high magnification, I do not use all the mirror when doing that, when not using all the mirror it is harder to see details, and it is nearly impossible to get a photo of my whole primary mirror so the experts can determine if my scope is collimated correctly.

If you got this far into this post you are likely bored out of your mind unless you have a Dobsonian telescope, but this is what I am interested in right now, I am talking to experts now and reading stuff they talk to each other about, I got this reply from one of them when I discovered something I never seen before by accident, "I suggest that you save resolving the autocollimator reflections for a later date", I put this tool in my telescope I got a couple days ago and seen 3 center marks(donuts) instead of one donut, and if I turn or twist or adjust certain things I can make all them donuts become one donut, and your collimation has to be almost perfect to see multiple donuts to make it perfect by adjusting it more even though it looks perfect with a normal collimation. :LOL:

See the faint reflection of the donut surrounding the hole in the cap, that is supposed to be perfect until you start trying to make multiple donuts into one donut, it's kinda like Jacob and dual SUs, he wants them to be adjusted PERFECT while I am good with it runs just fine.

Hey, if perfect is attainable, then go for it!

Its definitely cool seeing something like this come together.

I received one of the 2 secondary mirrors I am buying for this telescope I am building, it is huge, it is 3.5" across the short/narrow side, it would be used for looking at DSOs(Deep Sky Objects), a smaller one is coming that would be good for planet observation.

Well I started making a holder for the secondary mirror today, the first one was a failure but I learned a lot and the second one looks a lot better, it is not done yet as I am waiting to see if anyone on the telescope forum has a better way to make a lip to hold the secondary mirror in the holder.

I made the base piece and another one so I could make the secondary round out of flat metal, I used a 4" hole saw to make the plastic base and another one to help me keep it round and then I used a jig I made to make them perfectly round the size I needed, I actually made 3 as I messed one up.















Then I had to cut it at a 45 degree angle as that is the angle of the secondary mirror in a dob telescope.



Then I made a little tool to make a lip all the way around to hold the secondary mirror in.



It really did not bend like I thought it would, and I went slow.



This is what a tube looks like when cut at a 45 degree angle and then flattened out, my first try did not work.



When I did not like the first try I made another one using that flattened piece as a template.







So this is where I am at right now, I am waiting on the lip to see if anyone has a better way than the way I thought of, I don't really have the materials to make a metal secondary I can stick in the holder and then use a hammer to make the lip which I am sure would be cleaner looking.

It took me all day to get this to where I was happy, it is hard to make something like this from scratch without the proper tools.












I am now waiting on a spider assembly that is on its way, I believe it is the right size, spiders hold the secondary that I made today in the Upper Tube Assembly(UTA).

I modified the smaller secondary to fit my scope, but I will have to go back to the larger UTA(upper tube assembly) as the spiders I bought will not work with the smaller UTA.

This secondary assembly was not made for this type of connection so I made what I needed.







It started snowing today so I might build the larger UTA tomorrow with the new rings I made a while back.

That mirror holder looks like an exhaust tip you’d get at autozone or something. I’m not saying that negativily, just maybe an idea if you have trouble getting yours like you want it.

I am using that other secondary mirror right now, I will think about using that one later.

I actually put some bondohair on that secondary holder and then sanded it down, it needs one more coat to make it look really good when I paint flat black so there will be no reflections from anything but the mirror.





I put the upper tube assembly together today, everything I need to do is done except for the cutting of the truss tubes to make it the correct focal length, right now the measurement is 2137mm, but the primary mirror has rated focal length of 1811.15, so I believe I need to cut off 326mm(12 13/16") off each one of the truss tubes as if you minus 326 from 2137 you get 1811, this will put the upper tube assembly/secondary mirror at the proper height for it to come into focus within the range of the focuser assembly and eyepiece, I racked the focuser in and out and called the measurement in the middle/center what I would use, but I am waiting for the folks on the telescope forum to confirm what I came up with, I published all my measurements in my build thread there.

Here is what it looks like as of tonight.

















It needed some weight in the rear because the truss tubes are too long and putting the weight of the UTA out there too far, once I cut the tubes I am hoping that it will not need the 8 pounds of weight in the photo below, that is scrap metal and a pair of vice grips.



Once I have everything done and I test it to make sure it is working properly I will need to tear it all apart again and seal/stain/paint all the wood and metal parts, I have not even looked for shrink wrap for the truss tubes yet, I need eight 5' pieces or a 40' piece.