This is my first telescope, a 6" f/8 reflector that I received as a gift from my mother-in-law. Her father originally made this more than twenty years ago. Basically, I got a rather beat up tube with a 6" mirror (hand ground, I'm told) on one end and a crude focuser on the side of the tube near the business end. It came with one eyepiece (~35mm - no markings so it's difficult to tell exactly) and what I later discovered to be a Barlow lens. The mount was so rickety that it wasn't even included as part of the gift package. Hey, I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, so I thanked my lucky stars for what I did get. I spent many hours (mostly frustrated) trying to manually point the darn thing in the general direction of what I wanted to see. Jupiter and Saturn were my usual targets at the time.

The first "upgrade" was to purchase and install a Telrad finder. This solved most of my pointing/locating frustrations. The next thing I did was to build a very simple mount to make this scope a Dobsonian. I welded a couple of pieces of angle iron to some 1" square tubing and used PVC endcaps as the bearings. The up and down motion is as good as the commercially available Dobsonians. I still need to come up with a way of getting better sideways (azimuth) motion because all I do now is manually slide the base around on a sheet of acrylic. This part of the design really sucks. I replaced the tube and added a counterbalance system. I'd be really embarrassed by some of my "improvements" but, fortunately, it's pretty dark when I'm using this telescope! All things considered this is a decent little scope.