Well after seeing some of the high quality work that people on this site have been doing I am hesitant to even put mine up here now. With said I am also looking for suggestions on what I can do to improve what I have done so far and the best ways to finish it... It seems I am in the right place.
Please bare with me everyone. I haven't worked on this project in about 5yrs (yes its been sitting that long) and I am not in the country so I don't have access to the scope or anything for reference at the moment. I would like to get this out there so when I get back in September I can finally finish it up.
The design is a basic 12.5" F5 truss tube. My first cage was built using wood rings. After much research and realizing how heavy it was I had some aluminum rings cut by the local machine shop using their laser cutter. The truss tubes are 1" aluminum from the hardware and the tube connectors are from MoonLite. The secondary holder was purchased from AstroSystems. I am still trying to figure out the best way to mount that. Currently I am using banding metal, aluminum tubes I treaded as an attachment point. While I believe it will work alright its not pretty. I am also wondering about diffraction spikes. Many people are using an arced design. Does that eliminate or reduce them considerably? At the moment I can't remember where I bought the mirror cell from. I am also looking for a good way to mount the 2" crayford focuser I have. After seeing some people using carbon fiber cloth and resin, I was thinking that might be nice vacuum bagged onto to pink foam with wood for anchor points. Not sure what would be good there. Okay, well here are some pictures. Hopefully you guys can get some ideas spun up and point in the right direction.