2nd February 2000
Silvering the Mirror
The Ball and Socket Mounting
In the late 1970's I developed an interest in Astronomy. By 1981 I became more interested in the construction of telescopes and optics. At that time my wife Gill and I were bringing up two small kids and we had no spare cash, so I decided that it would be a good project to try and build a telescope, if possible, using basically scrap material and spending only what cash I really had to.
The firm where I was working had an an empty room, lots of odd bits of old machinery and Dennis, a friendly engineer who was willing to put up with me asking questions and requests for occasional help.
I had to build everything. I found a large sheet of 1" thick glass and using a 7" tin made a trepan from scraps of handy angle and an old motor. I had to buy two plummers block barings and two pully wheels .
The only other outlay was carborundum powder (which I managed to get in small amounts direct from the manufacturer), serium oxide, pitch (both from mail order), a tube of silicon rubber and some fibre glass resin. I got so desperate to get some of these bits that I once telephoned Patrick Moore to ask where I could get them without paying what seemed at the time outrageous prices (I spoke to his mother who was very nice if not all that helpful). i found a list of all the bits that I had to buy and the total cost for the whole project and a final working telescope came to £31.67
Having got all the things I needed I started grinding the glass discs. This took about 3 (lunch) hours each, wore out several tins (illustrated), made one hell of a racket even through ear protectors and provoked lots of enquiry's as to 'what was all that *@#~!!* racket? I finally had two neat round discs.
Most of the information came from 'Amateur Telescope Making'. An American book written in the 1950's. I was building things as I needed them so they evolved as time went on.
