20" and 12.5 Dobsonians

They look great! Somebody may go into scope building buisness! Eurvin

Well I think our dear friend David Kriege has that one covered. We couldn't afford one of Dave's scopes being a relatively small club, but we do make some excellent mirrors. So seeing as that we had the mirrors (80 of them made since 1987) so with David's excellent book on how to build telescopes (Obsession Style) we went to town on it. Some parts we couldn't find here, so we did purchase the cage clips and side bearings from Dave but the rest we did ourselves. And what a sweet scope it is. The one main thing we did change greatly was the Mirror Cell system, instead of a fabric (seat belt material) sling, we opted to create a stainless steel adjustable sling system, one that won't allow the mirror to swing slightly back and forth as the Telescope is raised and lowered. I noticed this when using a laser collimator with the original sling system (now this may not be the case with the Obsession scopes mind you, it could be a result of something we missed or did differently in the beginning) but I noticed that the laser dot would move about a 0.25 of an inch from center as the scope was moved up and down. So hmmmmmmmm!!?? How to prevent that!?! So the question was could it be the collimator? Nah turned out the fabric sling had too much give to it...so stainless steel it was and we haven't looked back since. So if your good with tools you can make yourself a great rock solid scope. Not suitable for astrophotography mind you, but man o man the views are awesome. With David Kriege offering scopes like this on the market ready built and ready to go and then to turn around and offer up a book on how to do it...well what can I say other than in my book David is one heck of a Stand Up Guy! Offering those who can't afford his products the chance to still build one and enjoy this style of telescope. Great stuff... Well I'm off to our workshop soon, to make repairs to an older Coulter 13.1 scope for a fellow who's had it for 15 years and has never had the opportunity to see through it correctly. He has never been able to collimate the scope, so we're building him a new mirror cell, 9 point floation and installing a proper spider. The old spider looks like something that came out of a lawnmower (blade) and there is absolutely no way to adjust it. Soooooo hopefully with these modifications he'll finally be able to have the full potential of really being able to SEE! So we'll fix him up seeing as that he transported his scope to us from about 200 miles away. In hopes that he'll be able to see millions of light years away! Anyway thanks Eurvin for the kind words! But we'll leave the scope building to the likes of David who has all those fancy tools to put out a great product. I'm far too busy observing and taking kids on whimsical tours of the night sky. Later Brother! And Dark Skies!!

Very cool!

very nice

Very nice looking! A very professional looking and very large impressive scope. Keep up the great work!

I like the size comparison! You look like a proud papa!

Beautiful scopes. You may use the 12.5 as a finderscope