Focuser grinding, tube ring and finder scope (Kugelblitz Telescope. Pt. 3)
This post was originally published on my old blog dedicated to amateur astronomy.
As I have mentioned before, the focuser is designed for 150mm tubes, so I had to disassembly and grind it to fit the 250mm tube diameter.
These are the parts I took out during the grinding, to avoid plastic dust. That taught me about its internal workings, and I realized that the 4 screws in the bottom plate will make the focuser harder to move when tighten, it may account for the DSLR weight.
Here’s how I performed the grinding:
Two sandpapers fixed with tape around the tube. I started with a 60 grit then a 80 grit. Two really rough sandpapers, but they did the job just fine.
My wife Catarina took that pic, thanks honey. <3
We’re also making the tube ring, which will hold the tube tight to fit within the mounts, the first being our Dobsonian mount (yet to be designed). It was kinda hard for me to find these rings to buy from local sellers. Most of the time these pieces come from US or UK with an exorbitant shipping price. So I decided to go with a “custom” design, making it in Styrofoam and handle it to a local metal worker to construct it for us in Aluminium.
Here’s our styrofoam 1:1, half of a tube ring:
And that’s the design of the piece:
Our crappy finder scope arrived, haha. I think it won’t be as useful as the red dot finder, and I’m still thinking whether I’m going to mount it or not, but here it is:
Me and Bruno went to the Pisolar yesterday (a local version of Home Depot) , we bought a bunch of material to start the building. The garage is starting to look like a proper workshop, but we’re making plans to clean up the mess down there, throw the old stuff out, fix the lights and the organization. We’re going to make it look neat.
But for now, here’s what we got:
