Hi all,
I'd been contemplating building a very lightweight GEM and Bartelising
it to make a good, light, portable GEM for some time.
Something I could setup in the yard to take wide field DSLR or throw
in the car for a trip to a dark sky, and run completely from a laptop
and batteries.
As the heart of any GEM needs a good, solid few T-pieces, the only starting
point seemed to be 2 inch pipe thread Tees with bearings installed.
This would certainly add some weight right from the start.
It would only ever have to take a DSLR or light APO or my 4" Bausch&Lomb.
Enter the scooters....
The kids have accumulated a total of 5 bloody scooters over the years and
if I had a dollar for every sunset, 'pick all the bloody scooters up and
put them away so I don't trip over them in the dark' moment.....well,
I could probably buy myself a G11.
I'd put a few into 'quarantine', a sort of twilight zone , where the kids
don't notice it missing for a few months, then it goes in the bin.
The twilight zone is, of course, the shed, where I can, unfortunately,
dream up some other use for such junk.
I've always been a sucker for aluminium extrusions and tubing and
couldn't help but think the scooters could be used for something useful
one day....then came the epiphany!
Here is the current work in progress....the lightweight GEM.
Everything so far has been too easy....the bearings can be preloaded
easily with the tubing and thrust race arrangements, I got the GEM
orthagonality pretty good by facing the Tee in the lathe, the counterweight
arm is the handlebars with the keyed, lockable tube being adjustable...
Pictures explain it all so far.....next step is to make a small worm
gear and drive to Bartelise the RA axis.
Steve
