12-28 & 12-29 2001

Well I can't leave well enough alone.  I went out to Home Depot and picked up a few PVC fittings to play with while we are waiting to get together for a group kick off meeting.  I already have a focuser and I want to see just how easy these will be to put together.  This is when I discovered the first (and I hope only) problem.  The instructions call for 90mm Outside Diameter (O.D.) PVC tubing.  I measured some 3" tubing at Home Depot and it seemed to be close to 90mm O.D.  I picked up a coupling, a 3" to 2" reducer and a length of 3" schedule 40 pipe.  When I got these home I say that there was a small difference in the O.D. of the 3" pipe as opposed to the 90mm tubing.  The 3" was just a little loose.

The first thing that I thought of was to make a new cell from 3" PVC components.  I was able to do this fairly easily but it required the use of a lathe and an additional fitting, a 3" schedule 40 to schedule 20 reducer bushing (Good Old Home Depot - the ATM'ers friend!). 

After a good look at the size difference a couple of wraps of electrical tape on the 3" pipe will suffice to take up the difference.  Conclusion:  The stock PVC cell will work just fine for us.

I also used the lathe to adapt my Intes crayford focuser to a 3" to 2" reducer fitting.  This seemed to work pretty well for something that I am doing just to play around with this project.  I trimmed a piece of 3" PVC pipe to the length that I think I need.

A little flat black paint and I can actually look through this lens using an eyepiece!

Install the lens.......

The tube is cut somewhat short for a reason.  I intend to use this as both a visual scope and for astrophotography - even in this test version.  The tube has to be short to accommodate the length of my Taurus Tracker III and camera.  I will have to use an extension tube when I use the scope visually.  The two modes look like this:

Photo Mode:

Visual Mode:

Now all I have to do is to adapt the scope to some kind of mount and wait for clear sky.....

Cost so far.......

Objectives and cells were about     $92.00 each

PVC fittings                                    $ 4.00

PVC Pipe ($9.00 a length)              $ 1.00

Focuser (from junque box)             $ 0.00

Not too bad, I cannot wait to test the thing out.