Hi Raj, Last night I did exactly that, went out and made my lowest cost purchase yet, a roll of film. I then placed the film in a sealed bag in the fridge (might use it some other time) and went to work on the canister. It's very kind of Kodak to centre-mark the lid for drilling. Anyway, in no time at at all I had my first collimating tool, and in even less time the optics aligned according to my new tool. Of course, in accordance with Murphy's Rules, the sky was nothing but clouds
.
From my local mentor, Ian of GAA, I'd been tutored closely on collimation and techniques not involving tools to bring my own initial efforts pretty close, but the canister did take it a huge step further and was so much easier and repeatable. I'd also scoured the collimation resources on this site and others, so the reading was behind me. I've also ordered a collimating tool from Bintel.
In the meantime, Ian had also given me a laser collimator to try. All I can say about it is, if we could get it collimated, then it might be useful. But the efforts of the two of us have proved fruitless, and it just does not appear as if it will ever produce anything apart from offset circles of varying diameters when rotated. Efforts to collimate it only appear to change the diameter of the circle, and maybe the offset. We'd be very interested to hear of the experience of others in using this tool. Using a v-block to support the tool while rotating has not helped.
Must say, I'm thoroughly enjoying the support and friendship provided by the IIS society!
Cheers,
Graeme
