Here's something I made a LOOOONG time ago. Some of you (older members) may recall seeing this in S&T. The smaller scope is a 6" f/18 folded Newtonian, the longer one is a conventional 6" f/8 Newtonian for comparison.
http://gallery.me.com/nicholas.loveday#100200
(and now you know who I am).
The mount was made for me by a friend with a backyard workshop, he was a bit of a nut. He had made a 12" Cassegrain the hard way, and I had assisted with the mirror grinding, polishing and figured his secondary, in return he made me an equatorial head which had 1.5" steel shafts running in bronze bush bearings.
He smelted the alloy for the worm drive (it was a 10" worm BTW) from chunks of Duralumin that I obtained by smashing up an old engine block with a sledge hammer, cast the disks and machined it as described in the ATM books. The furnace was adapted from a backyard barbie built from Besser blocks (we lined it with firebricks) and a vacuum cleaner running in reverse provided a forced draft, with a coke fire we had enough heat to melt the alloy nicely in a covered crucible. What we did was bloody dangerous in retrospect, but it worked out OK. We had realised the melting point of an alloy like duralumin was lower than the melting point all of its constituents, so it was quite easy to smelt this stuff.
The tripod was made from jarra floorboards, it fitted in my station wagon in one piece when I went bush. I also had made a "lawn trolley" using three nice fat wheels off a kids tricicycle. They don't make them like that any more. The tripod was essentially a tetrahedron, very solid and beat anything i have seen since.
Normally the mount carried a 8" f/7 Newtonian and one or other of the 6" scopes. After moving to Sydney I swapped it for a C8 which I soon realised was a huge mistake - the 8" and the folded 6" were vastly better.
When I see people suggesting an 8" scope on a mount like the EQ6 I have the vague feeling they have no idea what a really solid mount is... the old rule was the diameter of the worm wheel should be the same as the 'scope aperture, OR LARGER, and the axes at least 15% of the aperture, and I think these are still true....
