Oh Crap!

I received the laser collimator and the Cheshire collimator a couple of days ago. Both were in excellent shape and well worth the money I paid for them.

Now - the bad news...

I used the laser collimator to check the initial alignment of the Primary and Secondary mirrors and found out the eye piece focuser assembly is not aligned properly with the optical path within the telescope tube. Seems time, heat and humidity have conspired to change the cardboard tube of the telescope to offset the focuser towards one side of the scope tube - now I have to figure out how to correct this offset with the current focuser (which is not the best in the world) or purchase a better focuser for the beast! I may opt for the later. It appears the focuser is not perpendicular to the secondary mirror any longer - about 2-3 degrees off which is more than enough to cause alignment issues! For you to get the best images from a telescope you MUST have the optical path aligned pretty much DNO (dead nuts on).

A second observation - it looks like the primary mirror is "shifted" to towards one side of the telescope tube. The interesting part is the mirror is mounted to a particleboard plate using RTV which does not normal do such things so I must have offset mounted the mirror when the mirror was re-coated. DUH - this will play havac with not only the optical alignment but also the visual observations through the telescope in terms of secondary mirror refraction (not centered will cause side-ghosts - duplicate images that can not be focused to a single image, which is what I am observing in the scope now).

Not only did the laser collimator "show" these problems the Cheshire collimator confirmed the problems as I can not get the alignment correct without being "offset" in the secondary mirror images to get the Cheshire images "close" to where they should be - and I observe one "side" of the telescope tube where I would normally not see the tube side (primary mirror offset is causing this).

Before I can align this beast I have to fix the above listed issues...

Now I have to decide if I want to continue using the current Dobsonian-style mount or construct a different one - decisions, decisions!

More to follow - stay tuned!