Mounting: Monday build diary. Getting close.

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Monday: Turned a new brass weight on the lathe, then drilled and tapped a 7mm hole in the side. As usual, I used an adjustable furniture foot with M8 thread as the weight clamping knob. With a cut off, plastic wall plug as the intermediate pressure pad. Much nicer than steel-to-steel, the plastic provides a graduated grip. Allowing weights to be slid gently without them flying from end to end of the rail.

With the new weight on the right angle bar, to balance the offset 6" I detached the worms for some careful balancing. The 20kg of counterweights were still slightly too much and would sink to the bottom to the north of the mounting. 

Tying on two 0.5kg [1lb] barbell weights to the far side of the 7" tube rings cured the RA imbalance. Now I just need to fit a screw in each of the spare holes of the 7" refractor's [8"] tube rings. Then I can clamp the small weights neatly and securely.

After that I did some long slews to check if any problems cropped up. They didn't, so I am definitely making progress. Hopefully I can collect all the spare tools and tidy away all the boxes of fixings and cables which have been accumulating on the floor.

Every time I drop something it vanishes through the isolation gap around the pier. To completely disappear into the gravel on the ground floor.

I used a pause in the rain to take some pictures but it hard to get far enough away. I'm using no zoom at all [wide angle.] While holding the camera above my head, with my back to the wall, just to fill the full frame with something of interest. The light is very even when the sky is overcast. There just isn't enough of it to fill the shadows without burning out the highlights.

In case anyone is curious about the long extension tubes on the tail of the 6" this is the spacing before the H-alpha filtering. The filters have to be placed at a set distance from the focus to work at the PST's original f:10. A large, Baader D-ERF rejection filter sits about half way down the 6" main tube to remove [reflect backwards] the sun's intense [and focused] heat and light from the 6" f/8 achromat. Which is working at f/10 with an aperture of 120mm. My trials and tribulations with Solar H-a was covered in the usual great length back in February.

Click on any images for an enlargement.

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