My astronomy project:
Big Binoculars

Content:

1. Binoculars
2. Binoculars mount
3. Binoculars mount another idea * (You are here!)
4. Test rig
5. Wooden distance between pier and binocular arm
6. Binocular holder and First Light!

3: Binoculars mount another idea

After a lot of reading at forums I got ideas how to build my own mount to my big binoculars. This is my interpretation of how it could be done. First I have to solve how to rotate the binocular mount easy around the pier. This is what I bought to handle this problem, a caster wheel.

This caster wheel has a double roller bearing. My idea is to mount this with an extension on my pier. One problem, when mounted upside down like this the roller bearings are not protected from rain and water, I have to fill it with a lot of grease.

No need of the wheel, here I will mount the arm that holds the binoculars. If I need two arms there is space for the second arm too. The U-gap is 43mm.

This is how it will look if I got it to work. If I want a parallelogram mount it's easy to built it like that too, just ad one more arm. The green ring is a counter balance weight, about 7 kilograms.

With this construction I don't get the fine adjustment I thought about with the EQ2 mount. I don't have any experience if this is a must with 25x magnification. But this is easily to built so I can just built it and test it. I plan to have something like a handlebars from a bicycle to maneuver it.