Commerial astro gear workmaship

[Stefan Buda]

I myself don't use any commercially made telescopes, but whenever I do some work on one, I am shocked by the poor workmanship I see.

Yesterday I received a Meade secondary mirror for recoating and I'm appalled by the attitude that went into making it.


The carrier aluminium disc has been sliced with a circular saw without any further machining, other than drilling and tapping the mounting holes, and it's not even anodised for corrosion protection.

The mirror has been glued on eccentrically by about a millimetre and it also has a wedge error of about a millimetre. Shocking piece of rubbish.

[multiweb]

That's why they'll keep you in business. :)

[Atmos]

+1 :thumbsup:

[Peter Ward]

I have a Coronado SM90 filter that was made by Coronado, prior to Meade acquiring the company and sending production to Mexico....suffice to say it makes my Meade manufactured SM90 look sick....so I hear what you are saying.

That said, manufacturers such as Astro-Physics and Alluna do a superlative job and it would be very unfair to tar them with the same brush.

Like most things in life.....you get what you pay for.

[Lognic04]

I wonder what my tak would look like from your perspective?

[el_draco]

Totally agree. The best mid range kit I ever saw was a G11... Machining is a work of art. Wont touch low range stuff at all now. Just not worth the hassle. My Mantra: "Either pay for quality or build it yourself...."

[bojan]

Because if I build it myself, I will know who is to blame if it doesn't work ;)

[glend]

Why would Meade, or any high output telescope business, deliver build quality that would last a lifetime? It only has to be good enough to do the job over a reasonable time frame (longer than the warranty period). This is the age of throw away appliances, tools, cars, etc.

[bojan]

When I was just out of uni and starting my engineering career in R&D, there was a story about Siemens RF engineer who got himself fired after years of service because his high-power transmitter tubes never failed.. so Siemens was losing money on those tubes.

Most likely this story was just an anecdote.. but still illustrative one.

[AndrewJ]

Gday Bojan
Just google the "Phoebus cartel"


ie probably it wasnt an anecdote


Andrew

[Stefan Buda]

Actually I don't like fixing other people's creations. I like to be a maker not a fixer.


Colin, I've done your adaptor mod. You can collect it whenever it suits you.
By the way, what make is it. I'm curious because it looks were nice, but when I clocked up the dovetail side, the other one had quite a bad trefoil distortion and runout.


You may be right, as I never had anything to do with those brands.
However, I clocked up a Takahashi alignment telescope on the lathe, not long ago, and half of the assembly had a surprising amount of runout relative to the rest. Maybe it was a counterfeit one.

[Peter Ward]

Many, many moons ago I was an associate editor for the now defunct Sky and Space magazine. A project that I enjoyed was an official tour of the Meade and Celestron factories in Irvine and Torrance respectively.

The landscape has changed, with my understanding that both companies are Chinese owned, with Celestron now made in China, Meade made in Mexico (and possibly China) and there is a rumour that Synta (aka Celestron) actually own Sunny Optical Co (aka Meade) but don’t like to talk about it due an anti-trust ruling in the USA forbidding their merger.

Anyway, back in the day, Celestron figured their secondaries to get an acceptable optical null. Meade used the mix and match approach (eg mate a “hot”secondary to a “cool” primary) to manufacture optics that were rarely perfect, but rarely really bad....they fell with an “acceptable” zone of quality. I found that Celestron optics were not as smooth, but they invariably had more accurate figures than Meade.

As to what you get with mass produced optics today, well....I suspect with rough sawn metal components, only your satisfaction is now guaranteed :shrug:

[kinetic]

Pic 1: Original GSO 12" spider assembly....
Note the asymmetry.

2nd pic: my secondary with adjustable feeler gauge vanes.

3rd pic: fuzzy adjacent Miaplacidus...

http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/showthread.php?t=117302&

Steve