| Blog series by RaggedKerf | updated 10-19-2013 03:07 PM | 6 parts | 7138 reads | 3 comments total |
Part 1: Back to the Drawing Board
Note: I thought I had published this post back in the summer—-I was wrong. So…only 3 months late, I post it now, in mid-October. To refresh your memory, here’s the first post on this long suffering project. Somewhere between my idea and my skills, between the New Yankee Workshop and the local dumpster, my hiss drive rover met its fate. It wasn’t the design’s fault, I’m sure of that. It will work. It has to. What didn’t work was my last minu...
Part 2: Version 2.0
With the approach of Comet ISON and the Mars 2014 apparition getting under way and me out of commission for the past 2 months with a back injury, I have been chomping at the bit to (1) get observing and (2) get cracking on the hiss drive rover. It’s been a few months since the last entry (which I thought I had published already but…oops…it was still a draft until tonight) but all the real progress has taken place in the last three days or so. To start, I constructed so...
Part 3: Adding Support and Wheels
Building off the early success of this project in it’s second incarnation, I started to dismantle the old telescope base and reuse the wood which, conveniently enough, was just the right size. First up, I ripped apart the top of the old base and installed those planks cross-wise on the bottom of the rover to give it lateral support. With the extra strength and weight of these planks, this thing already feels more stable than the old base! Once the slats were glued and nailed ...
Part 4: Attaching the Top Half
I had planned on attaching the top of the rover to the base today…I really did. But alas….only halfway there. In order to attach the hinge in the right spot and allow the base to be uniform and not off center, I needed to shift the hinge to the side of the 1/2” plywood. That being the case, there’s not much plywood there on the edge for attaching hinges that will hold the top half of the base and a $350 telescope. So I improvised—-I attached a strip o...
Part 5: The Lever, and Attaching the Top, Part Deux
At last it was time to fabricate a handle lever to attach to the rover—-oh, and complete the installation of the upper half of the platform. As planned, the lever contraption will allow me to easily lift (critical now that my back has been injured and is on the mend) and move the rover/telescope combination.The idea was simple: cut two blocks of tubafore, round the top on both. Drill a 5/8” hole that lines up on both. Attach said blocks with glues and screws to the tongue of th...
Part 6: Assembling the Drive
Now the fun part begins. This project is all well and good as a telescope base (albeit one that opens up and has the potential to dump my yard cannon on the ground in a shattered mess)....but I designed it as a hiss drive primarily, and a telescope mobility platform secondly. It’s time to get drivin’. Going off what I found on the internet I gathered the following supplies: One inner-tube (a 14” non-highway trailer inner-tube from Menard’s I think). On...
