I thought I would share my first foray into making a mount adapter.
A couple of weeks ago I found myself without the tripod for my mount and unable to take advantage of a couple of cloudless nights. I had an old
Losmandy tripod available, but no means of adapting my mount to it.
So when I returned home, I figured I would have a go at making an adapter to avoid such frustration in the future. I bought an aluminium disc on eBay and set to work despite not having any metal working tools except a tap & die set from Bunnings. Fortunately I have a drill press and a router table with a down cut spiral bit that I had used for aluminium at slow speeds on a previous diy adventure.
Anyhow, the adapter came out surprisingly well and given my imaging setup is not very heavy, I’m confident it’s capable of holding the load. I even made a crude version of a captive nut to hold the centre bolt and found a threaded collar to use as the azimuth pin. Given how oversized the tripod is, I expect it to be nice and stable.
Thanks Paul & JA,
For the outer tripod rim, I just set a gap in my router table fence to match the curve of the Al disc with it just touching the bit and rotated it slowly by hand, setting the fence back 0.5 mm each full rotation until I had undercut enough for the disc to slot into the tripod top. It was slow going, but I wanted to be cautious.
For the inner mount recess, I used a cheap $10 eBay Forstner bit on my drill press - I assumed it would be dull in minutes, but it worked remarkably well and still seems OK - again I went slowly with plenty of cutting oil as I didn’t want to damage my drill press...or me!
I dream of a metal lathe, but I just don’t have the room for it - plus i doubt it would get much use compared to my wood tools.
Last edited by AstroApprentice; 08-03-2021 at 01:10 PM.