Opus
Now that the studio is complete (I really, really swear I’ll post pictures someday soon), I’ve been recovering for the last few weeks and enjoying working in this space. It’s so wonderful to be able to show off my work to friends and have them Ooo and Ahh at everything.
I’ve been getting the itch to build something again, but this time I wanted to do something way outside my experience (as if the studio wasn’t enough). But instead of disrupting our lives for three months, messing up the whole house with sawdust and tools, and spending I-don’t-want-to-say-how-many-thousands of dollars on a project, I would like to try something different. I’ve been thinking about just what that could be and have narrowed down my set of requirements to these:
1. New skills I want to build something that requires several skills I don’t have yet, and the more uncommon the better.
2. Must incorporate skills I already have. I want to bring to bear as many of my current skills as possible. This means woodworking and shop skills, which means tools, naturally. But I would like to use my tools in new ways, or to do things I’ve never done before. What I really mean is that it has to have a whole new level of:
3. Precision and beauty. I want to work on a higher level of precision than I’ve worked before. Much of my furniture looks good from a distance, and as I’ve progressed as a Maker I have been able to increase my quality and detail, but I’ve still never attained the level of craftsmanship that I would like. This new project will have surprising and beautiful detail at a higher level of quality than I have attained to date. I would like to build something with museum-quality beauty that will outlast me.
3. Complexity. More than just an inert wooden box or piece of furniture. I want it to be useful for something other than just sitting there and looking pretty. Concurrent with goals 1 and 3, this means possibly building parts of it out of non-wooden materials, which could open up all sorts of project possibilities in the future. Some kind of brass or interesting soft metal work would qualify nicely.
4. Must take a long time but be able to be put aside when I hit a roadblock. Oddly, I would like a project that I can’t finish quickly. Something I can really dig my teeth into. Not something I can finish in a long weekend, a couple of weeks, or even a month or two. I want to attempt something that will take me really deep into a new area and force me to do some real research to come up with the design. However, I don’t want to get so far off the beaten path that I’m making something that has never been attempted before. So, complex but familiar, with a bit of the unusual will become my mantra.
5. Small. Because I want to be able to put it aside when I stall, the thing needs to be small enough to get out of the way. This means no new additions to the house, I’m not going to restore a car, and it won’t be anything that requires more than about 5 square feet for storage while in construction. After it’s done I want to display it (preferably in my studio), so it will have to be in the breadbox-sized range.
6. Finally, and here’s the most important thing to me, the new project has to bring together as many of my other interests as possible. Which ones? I have many interests. Some of them I feed for a while, learn what I want, and then move on, but science, woodworking, and astronomy are near the top of my list of interests, and they’ve been with me consistently for several decades, only growing stronger as I’ve fed them. I love learning new things about the natural world and reading books about astronomers of the past and what they discovered using simple tools. Those tools have become massively complicated, but there is still room for the amateur to appreciate science and astronomy with low-capability devices.
So I have decided to build, from scratch, a telescope. It will be beautiful, functional, and portable. Powerful enough to view the planets and stars, and beautiful enough to sit in a museum. I don’t know what the design will be (Refractor? Reflector?Dobsonian? Schmitt-Cassegrain? Newtonian?) or how it will be mounted (Alt-Azimuth? Equatorial? Motorized? Free-swinging?) I want to build the mount as well as the scope. I’ll explore the benefits of each design as well as the possibilities of making my own lenses or mirrors (probably mirrors, which means an S-C or Dobsonian reflector, but I’m not ruling anything out yet. I’ll probably purchase my own eyepieces, since they are really important to a good telescope and next to impossible for the amateur to build, but I want to make as much of the rest of the telescope as possible myself- including the main optics. I’ve read that it’s possible to grind your own mirrors- a messy, time-consuming, labor intensive art. I anticipate that this project will be of the on-and-off variety as I stop for a few weeks or months to research and discover what the next step will be, or as work draws me away from the shop. I have a lot of reading to do before I can even decide what the final design will be! I’ve ordered three books from Amazon on optics and telescope building and look forward to digging into them. I’ve also raided our library for astronomy books. I have a lot of astronomy books.
So I’ll create a new category on the blog here: telescope. I’ll use it to keep track of my thoughts on the design and philosophy of the project, as well as detail the construction as it goes along (with pictures as I go this time!). I anticipate that it will take me several years with lots of pauses and downtime between posts. You can easily buy a mirror and eyepiece and slap together a Dobsonian-mount reflector in a few days using nothing more than a cardboard tube and a few pieces of plywood. That may be a good starting point for me, but ultimately I am aiming for something much more difficult and detailed. Something beautiful and functional and wonderful.
Please join me for the adventure!
July 15th, 2007 at 12:32 pm
What… not a monorail??