Binocular mount

I finally made a binocular mount for my faithful Celestron 15x70s.  It's a parallegram mount with five degrees of freedom: (1) the whole thing swivels where it attaches to the tripod, and (2) goes up and down; the binoculars then swivel (3) up and down and (4) left and right, and (6) can rotate a bit side to side.  It sits on a very short tripod as it's designed to be used by seated me and standing children.

Total cost was quite low.  The long dark pieces of wood are pieces of a recalled cherry crib that was being given away for scrap wood on Craigslist.  Most of the rest of the wood is 1/2" Baltic birch leftover from the 6" F/5 made for my friend, for some parts laminated to approximately 1" thickness.  There are a bunch of 1/4-20 carriage bolts and knobs from Amazon's Industrial and Scientific store.  I had some leftover PTFE for the main azimuth bearing, and purchased some cheap PTFE washers from Amazon for a low price (the price has now gone up by an order of magnitude).  The hideous counterweight is a bubble wrap envelope full of sand, duct taped all around.  The first iteration used a brick, but I was worried that a kid might whack someone on the head with it, and so bubble wrapped sand is better.

It was pretty easy to make.  I used a router for some round pieces, like the semicircular binocular attachment, but polygonal pieces cut with a hand saw would have worked just as well.

The azimuth bearing was the most complicated part.  It's basically scaled-down Dobsonian azimuth bearing: there are three PTFE pads inside, which ride on a CD (two out of my three Dobsonians ride on vinyl records).  This then bolts to tripod platform.

The tripod is entirely home made, too.  I once ended up buying twelve feet of 1.25" PVC conduit at Home Depot or Lowes because I needed a few inches worth for a focuser.  I expected I would eventually find a use for it, and hereby I did.  The tripod platform is a round piece of 1/2" Baltic birch, with some square poplar rods glued underneath, between which the PVC legs sit, attached with a carriage bolt.  To keep the legs from sliding apart too much, I glued three pieces of webbing, I think scrapped from a car seat or feeding seat, glued to the legs with Shoe Goo, and then screwed into place for additional safety.

I may later make a post with more detailed photos, but it was all fairly simple.  One thing that took me a bit of time to figure out is the brown block of wood that the semicircular binocular attachment attaches to.  It is a rectangle of cherry, with an up-down 1/4" hole and an across 1/4" hole.  The latter hole has a permanently mounted carriage bolt.  I used a 5/8" Fortsner bit to dig a deep well for the head of that bolt so that the up-down bolt would be able to sit to the left of that head.  I then filled the well with JB Weld for strength.