Roger's Optics and Restoration

18/06/2026

Work on my lathe will have to be briefly halted whilst I figure out where the squeak is coming from. About to strip it down. This is the first real problem in the 40 odd years I've had it (since new!). I'll get back to you...

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15/06/2026

Today I finished milling out the middle of the declination adjustment housing (took a while [3 hours] and a lot of fiddling towards the end). I figured a bit of preliminary assembly was in order just to see how it looked. So here’s some images of the milling and then the assembly and one of me holding the tiny thing. I placed an engineering set square and a 1.25” collimating eyepiece next to it for scale.

11/06/2026

For those who may wonder how glass pushing can merge with fitting and turning, here’s an image of my relatively good “reference flat”. It’s a slab of plate glass 340x270x18mm. Good enough! Can’t see much difference between the result from it and my metal reference plate (ex-university).

11/06/2026

What a fun day!! Four hours centering the rotary table & a small four jaw chuck (both over 50 years old and showing signs of wear), just to spend half an hour drilling seven 1.9mm holes 3.5 mm deep in an arc so I could then use a 2mm slotting bit to create the altitude scale slot. Came up well and I will be using a 9BA screw with a knurled k**b as the clamping screw. I can attest to the fact that my heart rate did go up while using such a small slotting bit!!

01/06/2026

I was getting tired of taking off the vice and putting on the rotary table. Due to the offset grooves in the rotary table I had to mount it at an angle so that I could clamp it securely. Then I had an “epiphany”: make a mounting plate to fit under the rotary table. All well and good, but the only usable piece of steel plate I had was too small, then another “epiphany”. 😁 make two clamps that would extend under the bottom of the rotary table to the mounting plate.
After a couple of hours fuffing around the job is done and I can mount both the rotary table and the vice at the same time. I never have to do large parts so this works fine. If I have to work on a larger part, I’ll remove the two and clamp directly to the mill table. Happy Jan! Images show one of the clamps, two images, to allow for parallax, of the two offset mounting grooves on the rotary table and the two mounted on the mill at both end of the table travel (with still a bit more travel left).

22/05/2026

So I require two spirit levels for this build. They have to be 5mm in length to fit correctly. The hardest part was deciding if I should go the whole hog and use 3mm glass tubing and mineral oil, or if I should just fake it. Common sense led me to the decision to fake it. So some clear heat shrink tube over a dress makers pin made the capsule and a couple of hours figuring out and creating the brass surrounding parts led to this. Now to replicate it.

17/05/2026

So some more progress. The tripod riser and its base plate are now dimensioned as best as possible from the scrap I am working from! The base plate was milled circular on my rotary table, bolted to a sacrificial aluminium plate. The only flat stock I had was 0.2mm too narrow (you can see a small dark patch on the edge), but I figure I will buff that out with 1000 wet & dry. The taper on the riser is 2.63° which I set up trigonometrically from the DRO. That was much easier than guesstimating from the cross slide protractor which has 5° increments. A 6mm stud holds the parts together. The cut out in the base plate was milled with a 2mm slot cutter, first time I had used it so I took it nice and easy! 😳 Holes and slots for the azimuth securing bolts and the fine adjust are yet to be drilled once my nerves settle down.

10/05/2026

Now that the “milestone” (millstone) birthday is out of the way, the gardening and mowing done, I had a couple of hours to do some work on the model refractor build. The recesses were milled into the legs that will enable the legs to be closed and the RA axis parts soldered together and cleaned. A few more minor things need to be done before I can assemble the RA & DEC parts together. So far so good.

20/04/2026

Felt a touch/tad/slightly better this arvo so I cut out the legs to approximate size. They now require some sanding to size, a small block placed between the two parts of the leg and mounting holes drilled. Hard timber as well, the Japanese pull saw did a great job.

14/04/2026

Moving down to the tripod, the top mounting plate had to be made to determine what dimensions will be needed for the base of the EQ mount. So there just happened to be an old fitting that had a hex bolt machined onto it. A bit of setting up on the mill to allow three lugs to be machined was required. The shape was roughed out and then the lugs finally brought them down to their 10mm final width. Next I have to drill six holes and tap them for 8BA to take the leg bolts, but that’ll have to wait until I stop sneezing due to a bad chest cold.