This is the heart of the web site, where I'll describe the various amateur telescope making (ATM) projects I have done.
I got my start in ATM'ing in a curious way. Having been inactive in amateur astronomy for nearly 15 years (About Me), I got back into the hobby in January 2000 by purchasing a 10" SCT. Life was grand, but I decided that I wanted a larger scope for those few times each year when I anticipated getting beyond suburban skies into darker venues in the Shennendoah mountains or West Virginia. Since this would be a "light use" scope (and my budget was limited) I planned to buy either a Meade or Celestron Dobsonian scope, which had to have as much extra light grasp over my 10" LX200 as possible to justify the move.
I found a two-month old 16" Meade Starfinder on Astromart (www.astromart.com) in August 2001, drove the 400 miles roundtrip to pick it up, and found when I first set it up that it seemed as if Meade had basically sold the customer a decent set of optics and then thrown in barely workable hardware to let him use the mirrors, almost as an afterthought. Having to manually insert the heavy mirror cell into the optical tube assembly (OTA) within a half inch of three steel mounting spars-- only two of which could be seen at any one time)-- particularly offended my sense of order, and seemed guaranteed to produce scratches on the mirror's edge in short order. (There were already a few when I got it, and I may have added an extra the one time I tried to mount the stock configuration.) So, having set the scope up once, I embarked on a round of "just a few changes" to make it easier to use. After a year or so of steady modification, I had totally customized, tracking, computer driven scope.
The curious side effect of all of this ATM'ing was that it improved my general handicraft skills and practical problem solving abilities. The only "shop class" exposure I'd had was a semester each of wood and metal shop back in Intermediate school (1972-74), but I found myself doing all sorts of orthodox and unusual stuff with power tools. I also found myself willing to improvise solutions to all sorts of home repair problems, ranging from the refrigerator to the central air conditioning system. (I drew the line at natural gas...). After looking at some kind of performance problem and the associated hardware, a solution invariably seemed to suggest itself. Has anyone else found this happening after getting involved in ATM'ing?
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