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Starfest 2010 Workshop - Necessity Is The Mother Of Invention

Dave Yates and I were honored to be invited as guest speakers this year.

The theme of our topic was how to make accessories that are not commercially available using tools that would be found in an average home workshop. Our goal was not to focus on specific projects but rather to demonstrate how standard workshop tools can be used to fabricate aluminum parts. We also presented some simple electronics projects.

During our presentation, we demonstrated several practical projects that you can do at home:

 

Download the PowerPoint Presentation

Some background

Many of our past projects involved highly complex "machining" but we were able to do it with ordinary woodworking tools.

The photos above show accessories that were made for our CPC1100 telescopes. The goal was to improve the stability of the tripod for use as an astrophotography platform. We had already purchased a "Heavy Duty" Wedge which proved to be totally inadequate so we devised our own solution. Included are:

Tools used:

Some of these projects were the spring board to a small "hobby business" (Telescope Performance Improvements - TPI) and we now offer some of our inventions for sale.

Starfest Workshops