OK, so here is the compressed version of the build, to some pictures along the way, here are a few.
This build has given me many excuses to acquire things, the scope itself seems to be only the tip of the iceberg for what I have talked my wife in to
It was probably about august '07 when I was browsing and sw a guy in Italy had built a 12" RC. At that pont an RC just meant $$$ from RCOS and I wasn't aware that you could buy the optics to build your own. He bought his optics from a guy in Italy for a couple thousand euros. At that point I thought perhaps I could build one. I then found Paul Jones at star instruments supplying optics for a 12.5" RC for $2200USD from memory. I learnt that he supplied optics to RCOS and thought this was good enough for me. I bought them and it took ~four months for them to arrive.
It was at the end of december that I thought I had better start doing something abot the scope knowing that the mirrors would arrive soon..
Now, a couple of fortunate things happened in between. One was that I decided that my G11 was not going to carry a 12.5" RC for photography and I convinced my wife that I needed a paramount. This consumed a number of hours over a few weeks.
Once the paramount arrived it was clear that I cold not pull this thing out every night I wanted to use it. It was huge and even with a permanent pier that I planned to put in the yard it was not going to be practical. I decided I needed to build an observatory. I decided on a dome and how to build it. It became apparent that this was going to take considerable time to build using up all my weekends for some time.. I talked to my wife, again, thinking that maybe we should buy one rather then use up all my weekends when we had small children. Lucky for me, again, we agreed (sort of) and I had a sirius 3.5m automated dome shipping over. Some people have noted that my wife may be a push over
These are two benefits that seemed to happen all because of the 12.5" that I hadn't built yet..
So I went down to the workshop and started to prototype out of wood. I didnt want to waste expensive aluminium without a full size model. I have never built a cassegrain design before so I more or less copied the RCOS design. It had an advantage that I didnt need to do compound angles for the trusses, the disadvantage, not that I see it as one is that the center section is larger then any other section..
So, here are the initial pieces out of wood and the first pieces I machined, the connectors for the trusses. There was a reasonable amount of time consumed doing these..
About this time the mirros arrived..