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That's a white primer for painting fibre glass and difficult surfaces.
I like the rough chop mat look of the fibre glass, it hides a few blemishes in the ply wood.
I have started painting it a grey hammer tone finish which gives it that metallic look .
The design is my own but I took about 12 months of procrastination and research on the web of others done a similar way with ply not necessarily fibre glass coated , metal and aluminum .
I had the resources to do it in metal myself but was not confident of getting it square.
I have a machine shop that could have done it but the expense was going to be over my budget .
I found working with the ply easy and cheap to get every thing square my self.
I used fibre glass to ensure stiffness and seal the ply to stop warpage ect.
I found designs done in ply with out fibre glass so thought this is going to make sure of it's stiffness.
This is one thing I found people made comments about a fork mount , is getting the forks stiff so as not to get the tuning fork problem inherent in too light a fork.
I had a SCT a while back which had problems and was in pieces for repairs and the one thing that stuck in my mind was how much the fork arms vibrated and flexed with out a scope attached. Quite scarry! But that's the price you pay for portability, somthing i am not worried about.
The actual shape and dimensions are to accommodate a larger scope for the future .
I used as large a triangular shape in the fork arms as a 1200x1200 piece of ply will allow , and large enough to allow full swing of the scope.
I wanted it made from one single piece for the front and one for the back.
It is made from basically 2 1200x1200 fork pieces of 19mm ply and is as accurate as my drawing the shape on the ply for cutting.
To that are the various side panels screw and glue together into one piece then coated in 2 layers of chop mate and 2 of 75mm bi-direction tape for all the joins.
The base has a 75x35 rectangular steel tube H frame fibre glassed to the bottom panel on the inside.
This gives a non compressible inner surface for the 8 drive disc bolts to seat against and make the base rigid.
The 650mm RA drive disc is directly mounted to the fork base and you can see the bulge on the base where it will sit.
I will do a full article with lotsa pics of the mount in stages when it's finished.
Mark
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