Re: [ATM] Bob May's refractor

["Lawrence D. Lopez" <lopez@mv.mv.com>]

Bob:

Do it right.
Borrow someone's lathe.

Larry
Bob May wrote:
> It's not much, just a F8 scope made from SF12 and BK7 glasses in
> a Fraunhoffer configuration with a spcing between the two
> glasses.
> The thing is that I wanted to build a nice tube for the glass but
> there's one thing that I couldn't get over, the largest lathe
> that I have is a 6" lathe and that will, in no way, cut anything
> larger than that size!  Since the glass is 6.2555" in diameter,
> that means that I've had to go to that good ol'  standby.  the
> good ol' woodshop stuff.  Cut some rings on the router for the
> lens cell and put them together, making a fairly decent cell out
> of some plywood from a pallet, then decided that since I was
> already using pallet wood, might as well continue so I ended up
> taking some palllets made from some fruitwood, ripped them a bit
> and made a bunch of four foot strips which ended up making a tube
> with twenty of them.  The back end is some more of the pallet
> fruitwood with a Meade  two inch focuser on the end.
> Actual focal length is 050" for the scope and managed to get that
> looking at the hills about three miles from my place, cut the
> tube to the exact length I desired and then started in on some
> baffles.  More pallet wood hit the focuser and I ended up with
> three baffles of five, four and three inches, not trying to do
> any particular theory on proper baffleing but just throwing some
> in there for the rigidity of it.
> I have a small telescope tripod with German Equatorial head and
> ended making up an adapter from a piece of aluminum from
> somewhere that ended up having a curve that almost matches the
> wood tube on one side and  wiith a dovetail setup on the other
> side.  Two blocks of hwite oak (from, yes, another pallet!)
> inside the tube and the plate was mounted to the tube which left
> doing dovetails for the other chunck of white oak.  Would you
> believe that woodworking doesn't do 30 Deg/ dpvetao;s?  Yep, the
> biggest angele that they do is two degrees less.  That meant that
> I had to setup the table saw to the required angle and then cut
> them on the saw.  Did a nice job and, with some lead-in at one
> end, the wood slides on easily to the dovetails of the al plate.
> Things that still need to be done are gluing in the baffles and
> painting the outside.
> Needless to say, I do love pallet wood!
> Bob May
> Due to the large volume of SPAM thaat I'm getting, add an open
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>
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