Re: [ATM] re; Best book to learn mirror making

[Mark Holm <mdholm@telerama.com>]

Ah yes, Richard.

Richard has a point buried in his sarcasm.  The ATM 1, 2 & 3 books are 
over 50 years old.  Some portions date back into the 1920's or 30's.  
That is long enough that many things in them are seriously out of date.

Texerau isn't quite as bad, though the moss is getting pretty long on 
that book too.  I haven't read the LeClaire's book.  It has the possible 
advantage of being much more recent.

Texerau still has a fair amount of value. The book is well written and 
well organized.  Texerau was a quite accomplished professional 
optician.  He was also active in atm circles, especially in France.  His 
methods were proven and tested by atm's.  Tex will give a pretty good 
picture of the whole process.  You have to be open to the fact that 
better methods have been developed for several things.  Four big ones are:

Tile in dental stone tools for grinding.

Forming pitch laps.

Computer programs for reducing Foucault test data.  (Sixtests is my choice.)

Plop for designing mirror cell flotation.  Tex's mirror cells are truly bad.

Texerau has a tendency to make dogmatic statements.  Some of the authors 
in the ATM books are even worse this way.  These statements have an 
amazing ability to get under Richard's skin.  Read any of these books 
with an open mind, realizing that there are many ways to skin a cat, and 
better methods have often been found.

Kriege & Berry's  "The Dobsonian Telescope"  is very well organized and 
written.  It is primarily about the mechanical end of big Dob's.  You 
won't get an absolutely cutting edge Dob working from their plans, but 
you won't be in the dark ages either.  There is a fairly good appendix 
on mirror making, especially large, thin mirror making, by Bob Kestner.  
It's not really an introduction to mirror making, and isn't as complete 
as a beginner should have, but is a good help for the big stuff.

Mark Holm
mdholm@telerama.com

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