Summer Solstice Telescope Project

I have spent some time over the last week trying to figure out how to find some of the magic plastic laminates that make dobs azimuth bearing work better.

I have a 10 inch Orion XT10.

I looked around for the black magic laminate called ebony star - the "-50" version - but found no laminate at all in the local HD and Lowes.

When I was nosing around in the new Lowes out on I-10 at 1604 this morning, I was able to find the next best thing, a sheet of FRP - fiber reinforced plastic. I bought a 4x8 sheet for $32. (Ebony star when it used to be available cost upwards of $80 for a sheet.)

I also picked up a can of contact cement and a few chip brushes.

The first thing I did was to replace the LP record bearing in my "Helotescope". The FRP with stick on furniture glides worked so much better than the record!

Next project was a little bigger. I decided to apply a ring of the FRP to the underside of the round board on my 10 incher's bearing.

I took the central bolt off and cleaned up the under-surface of the board and the teflon like bearings. I used the bottom board to trace a circle on the FRP and then cut the circle out with a jigsaw.

The bottom of the board has several bolt like hardware pieces that I may want to take out someday, so I cut the center of the circle out with the jig saw. In addition, they stick out of the bottom of that board by a fraction of an inch and covering them would be difficult.

Afterward, I figured out that I could have cut the outside and then the inside circles with my router and made an even neater job of it. All that would have required was building a little circle cutting jig - plans available on the internet. Well, I used the jig saw and especially the inside edge is not very pretty.

I applied contact cement to both the circle I had cut and the baseboard where the two pieces needed to be joined. I allowed the glue to dry for 5 minutes in our 100 degree heat and glued them together. Maybe next time I will put two layers of glue on the pieces. That works a little better. After the glue had set well, I used my router to give a smoother outside surface to the white ring.

The results are promising. I set up the scope this evening in my back yard and Saturn was much easier to follow at high power by hand. This is a technique I will probably use when I build my next scope.