The most important thing about a mount of any kind is that it be steady! First, formost and always. As you have already noticed, you are having troubles pointing the scope at anything as the mount is bouncing things all over the place.
One way is to build a large wood tripod and use the az.-alt. method of allowing the scope to move about. Using 2x4s and so forth will help a lot as rigidity is what you are looking for. If it's just going to sit out in the back yard, a plywood faced pyrimad with a flat tope is quite rigid and will probably also allow you to have it as a doghouse of strange porportions. Next is to insure that the axises are sufficently rigid so that you don't have things bouncing about when you try to move the scope about. The Dobsonian method is to provide large bearing surface areas to provide the rigidity needed. The alt. bearings can be physically fairly small for that small scope but putting them a decent distance apart will provide the rigidity.
I'd run with the az.-alt. type mount as you don't have a RA clock drive and thus, you really don't need to provide that direction of movement to be able to see things up in the sky.
The scope is a 2.5" F11 so it's not going to be too bad but I would recommend that you make a new back to it with a better focuser so that you can use the better 1.25" eyepieces with it so you can see more of the sky at one time. I might also mention that the max. magnification that you will really want to use is about 120 power and that's not all that bad as most objects in the sky need less magnification than that to see them. The magnification of the light gathered by that small scope does mean that a lot of stuff is just too dim to see well with the scope and the only solution is to get a larger scope.
Have Fun!

• how can I change the alt bearings? - bolintx - July 30, 2001 - 21:31 UTC
  • Bearing - bobmay - July 31, 2001 - 18:47 UTC
    • Cradle .. how to - bolintx - July 31, 2001 - 20:22 UTC
      • Found it - bolintx - August 1, 2001 - 20:57 UTC