Piers and Sand...

[Shawn]

As some of you know , I built a pier last year for the 14" er, At the time I over enginerd the project or so I thought..

Now the nuts and bolts are, I remember being advised by another member here about the pro's of filling your pier with sand. Own up if your reading this, I should have listened...What a difference it made to my pier...

Thank you....

S

[csb]

I gather then that you have less vibration. Great!

I have a tripod with aluminium legs and have been thinking of doing the same.

Or would it be better to get steel legs?

[Shawn]

Im not sure about that Craig, In fact im not entirely sure that vibration was the issue, the pier was about 150kg empty now I guess it to be around the 300 mark I put 8 buckets of sand in it at about 20kg a bucket. What exactly has happened Im not sure...but its a good thing..:)

It may be just a function of added mass, putting everything under stress so that any movement firstly has to overcome the stress... dunno...

[rogerg]

I'm not sure if it was me or not, but I would have likely commented something about filling a pier with sand. It's what I've done to dampen the high frequency vibrations I used to have in my steel pier. Worked well too.

[Astroman]

Yep filling the pier with sand is a good step. I filled mine with foundry sand and have not looked back, best thing you can do for a pier.

[Robert_T]

Craig, I once went through this will aluminium tripod with an EQ5 on top, I meticulously filled and packed every leg with sand, rigged up a complex of braided cable and turnbuckles, fitted another tray (wooden) etc and at best it took 10second down to 7 or 8 of wobble.

Your best bet for tripod stability I believe are heavy wooden legs. The damping time is generally quite good with these.

Piers of course are something else and will benefit from sand.

cheers,

Rob

[csb]

So the old technology still is great.

I have been wondering why some of the good quality mounts had wooden legs.

Thanks.