Images above not endorsed by author of this site!!!
My Way of Making Worm Gears
(At the price of two Big Macs!)
1) Worm Gear (Wheel) mentioned below
2) Worm Gear (Rod)
3) Cheap brass worm gear (bought)
4) DC-motor (12 V)
General
When using higher magnifications on a telescope you will need an accurate motor drive to keep the objects being observed in track.
But the costs for such a worm gear can indeed be astronomically high! So I decided to create and make my own worm gears which would allow me even to take photographs... I was very curious if I could get there.
I started with the idea of a cheap rod as a worm drive. That was easy. But how to make a worm wheel without any professional or semi-professional mechanical devices? Furthermore I did not know anything about epoxy-based materials or how to build a drive at all...
And then I tried the following: First I cut a wooden circle of about the size and thickness that my worm gear should have. Second I constructed a small wooden bed (a base plate and two wooden "walls" to either side), placed the rod centered in this bed, fixed it, covered all parts with vaseline and poured finally some quick hardening epoxy into this bed.
Some minutes later, when the epoxy began to harden (this is slightly difficult...) I removed the rod and lifted the epoxy out of it's bed. The epoxy can become very hot at this moment. Before it continued to harden, I mounted it to my wooden circle and fixed it with a tape. After some hours (or better a whole day) I was able to glue the epoxy around that wooden circle.
Today I am able to track any object even with very high magnification and can take pictures with my (also homebuilt) CCD-camera up to 60 secs. without any correction.
Additionally, I used a second, very small worm gear (which was very cheap to buy) to reduce the motion of my drive further, so that I was able to adjust the motor drive to the needed clock speed.
Back to Main Page
Email me at daniel.sch@spammenot@bluewin.ch
Please be back soon.
This page is hosted by 
Get your own Free Home Page