In the Shop (12/27/2009): In my office is a heavy-duty Linhof tripod holding an alt-az mount which, in turn, holds a a 5-inch apochromatic refractor made by Roland Christen in 1986. This is the telescope I use on a Losmandy G11 for deepsky astro-photography. For just looking, the Giro alt-az mount is simpler, much easier on the back, and fun to use. The Linhof tripod is showing its age. I bought it on eBay for next to nothing. It needed, among other things, new feet. Without feet, the tubes that provide its levelling abilities take core-samples of whatever grass, mud, sand or ugag it happens to be standing on. I cut three blanks from a 6 foot length of aluminum hex
stock (1.25 inches flat to flat), chucked them into a Barnes lathe (made c.1900 in Rockford, Illinois,
not far, as it happens, from Roland Christen's optical shop), and There's not a lot that I enjoy more than working in the basement shop with this old lathe. I learned a bit of shop-craft from Q.D. Greene in the Johnson City school system's vocational school in an adult-ed machine-shop class. Thing is, when you're young, once you're on the college-bound track, "they" never let you get anywhere near lathes, milling machines, bandsaws, or grinders. I'm an amateur astronomer, so I'm almost always in need of some one-off adapter, fitting, or thingawatchit. My grandfather Stanley Mann McKee was a machinist, so maybe there is a genetic aspect to this affinity for carbide bits and spinning metal. I went back to shop class, post-college. The first foot took an hour, including time to disassemble, clean, oil, and reassemble the cross-feed on the lathe which had come unadjusted somehow. The next two took about 20 minutes each. That works out to 1.8 feet per hour or almost exactly 3 miles per year. I don't call this the slowblog for nothing. See if a little of the romance of the machine comes through in these before and after photos:
Both: Nikon D1x, SB-28DX strobe, 18-55mm AF-S Nikkor VR G
:: back to the slow blog :: |