Televue 101mm Telescope for wide field work and Celestron C8 for more detailed close-ups. Celestron CG5 Eq Mount with upgraded tripod legs - Pine 2"x4"'s (on 4/9/00 the legs were upgraded once again to Adjustable Pine Legs). I am also using the Orion/Vixen GP-DX motor drives which work really well on this mount. I can get up to 100 second unguided images using this setup. Most Images aquired and processed using MaxIm DL/CCD v2.0 and Photoshop v5.0 using the SBIG ST7 CCD camera.
My idea in replacing the alumunum pieces of the legs in the CG-5 mount was to literally just do that and reuse all hardware. So first you need to take each leg completely apart including drilling out the rivots that hold the bottom of the upper leg pieces to the metal sleve. Oh yea, you will need (this is what I used) 1 8' pine 2" x 2" and 2 8' 1" x 2"'s. The 1x2's are used for the upper leg pieces and the 2"x2" is used for the middle sliding leg. Since the 1x2 won't slide through the metal slider piece you will
need to trim the 2x2 on one side by about 3/8". You will also need to notch the bottom of the upper 1x2's to fit into the metal slider. This hopefully makes alot of sense if you are actually taking the pieces and putting them together :-). Anyways, you do this for each of the 3 legs. You will need a few small wood srews to attach the upper legs to the metal slider. Now, to really
stablize the legs you need to make a second metal sleeve that goes around the top of
the middle 2x2 (or 2 x 1 5/8 ish after you trimmed it) and around the flanking
1x2's. What I did was to take one of those 8 or 10 inch long nailing strips that are used to join 2x4's length wise (the ones I used were like 10" long, 2" wide and maybe 1/8" think, easily bendable!) and wrapped it around the 3 pieces as described above, making sure that is was tight enough to keep the pices ridged but not too tight as to restrict the sliding of the middle leg. I then used a single wood screw to attach the wrapped metal stripping to the top of the middle leg, again making sure it wasn't too tight to rescrict
the movement of the middle leg. I then attached the plastic spreader and then
attached the legs onto the upper base. BTW, in this case you will need longer bolts.
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