Ah, memories.
I built a few scopes in the 70's - but bought a heavy equatorial mount from AASC about 1972-3 when I made my first Newtonians - first a 6" f/8, then an 8" f/6.7 (in those days most 8" mirrors were about f/7-f/8) then a folded 6" f/18.
You can see the mount in these pics... the head was made from steel pipe sections with bronze bushes press-fitted in the ends, with cadmium-plated 1.25" solid steel shafts.
A few years later a worm was made for me by a friend who managed to melt and cast alloy blanks, then machined an 8" worm wheel with 243 teeth, with clutch. At the time I was a bit short of cash so only had hand-cables to drive it, and I thought it wasn't worth motorising. With hindsight it probably would have worked well as this worm wheel was huge compared to anything else around commercially and was quite robust. The alloy was duralumin, which came from an old engine block which I was able to smash into small pieces using a sledge hammer, though they were a bit porous they were good enough for this. I made a fixed tripod out of jarrah floorboards (very solid too) and this sat on a wheeled base on fat wheels cannibalised from a kids trike, it turned out to be stable enough. The baseplate of the mount visible in the 3rd pic was 1/2" steel and those bolts holding the base to the tripod were 1/2" - this beastie was quite RIGID - flexure was not an issue !
The cradle was designed to carry the 6" f/8 and the 8" Newtonians. In 1978 I had come up with a design for a folded long-focus Newtonian and built the 6" f/18 (square plywood tube) shown beside the 6" f/8 for comparison. For those who haven't seen this design, the layout of the 6" f/18 is included.
The mount originally had a piece of tin with a bolt and wingnut to clamp the tubes on the cradle but this was a rather poor solution; seatbelt webbing and some cord did a much better job !
I gave the two 6" scopes to friends in Canberra, and when moving to Sydney sold the mount and the 8" to buy an orange-tube C8 instead which was at least a lot more portable, though the C8 optics turned out to be distinctly inferior and the spur gear drive in the C8 was rubbish in comparison to this one.
Those old enough may remember seeing this scope in the 1981 June edition of S&T
