The story of this telescope restoration begins in April 2008. The scope shows up on ebay in California. The seller stated he bought it the weekend before at a garage sale and didn't know anything about it. 'doublestar' first correctly identified as a mount made by Bill Schaefer and this was confirmed by 'tim53'. The thread to the discussion can be found here: http://tinyurl.com/lv7rjp

The scope was purchased by a gentleman in Long Island, NY with the buy-it-now option and was shipped from CA to NY. Soon after receiving it however, the new owner felt the project was more than he wanted to undertake and the scope soon appeared on Astromart. Regrettably for me the Brandon eyepieces that came with the scope were sold separately.

I had followed the ebay auction and discussion here with interest. When the scope appeared on Astromart, I contacted the seller and proposed a trade for one of mine. A deal was struck and I came into possession of the Schaefer scope last spring.

During the discussion on CN in April, Clive Gibbons was first to reference the great website dedicated to Bill Schaefer by Larry Adkins which can be found here: http://tinyurl.com/mjt83h Larry has very kindly given me permission to reproduce photos from his website in my posts here. He has also sent me high resolution files of the website photos. I won't go into Bill Schaefer's history here as everything I know I learned from Larry's site. However, I can confirm with almost 100% certainty what others have suspected, that this scope is perhaps the earliest known example of a Schaefer mount and telescope.