Quote:
Originally Posted by glend
Your hexagonal ply tube, even at a seven foot length, would probably be stiffer than a thin walled steel or aluminium tube and they would require wide spaced tube rings and bars to support them. I always wondered how people baffle and paint the inside of those long metal tubes. Laying up a ply tube, at least the way you did it, seems very sensible. The test would be to check the collimation sag on the mount.
|
The thin ply tube is very stiff and light with no sag at all. The 6" OTA is 14kg and the 5" is less than 9kg including tube rings, finder, diagonal and eyepiece.
They just don't look like classic telescopes, not that that really matters. They perform like the real thing and at night I still enjoy using them very much.
There are a few techniques for fitting baffles to metal tubes. One way is to make a skeleton frame with the baffles at their correct spacing and then slide the frame into the tube. Painting the inside can be done with a brush on a stick or even a spray can on a stick with an extended trigger for the nozzle.