Does anyone know the actual costs of making good apos like tak's or ap's, labor and material? How about the mounts? I really have a hard time justifying tak's overpriced mounts.
Actual costs of ap refractors
Started by acgtek, 11/09/2003 02:28AM
Posted 11/09/2003 02:28AM
Opening Post
Posted 11/09/2003 04:37AM
#1
>>Does anyone know the actual costs of making good apos like tak's or ap's, labor and material? How about the mounts? I really have a hard time justifying tak's overpriced mounts.
Have you checked out Astro-Physics website? Roland Christen has a good explanation of the processes that he uses to make his scopes. Of course when it comes to AP scopes, you cannot really put a price on his labor and he does the final figure on all the objectives.
Regarding the expense of the mounts. Precision machining costs some real money. Machining gears with low periodic error is expensive, the tolerances are small. For example if one is machining an 8 inch diameter gear, the maximum error can be no more than about 0.0005 inch, or about 1/8th the thickness of a human hair.
Once someone told Ted Williams that he was having trouble hitting inside fastballs and asked Ted what he should do.
Ted answered: "Don't swing."
The same is true of those Tak mounts. If you don't want one, then buy a CG-5 or an Orion Atlas. They cost less....
If you want to know what it costs to make an AP scope, I suggest posting your question to the newsgroup Science.Astro.Amateur Roland Christen is active will probably surprise you with both the cost and with his frankness.
But I can tell you that these guys are not getting rich doing this, there is a large investment and a small return.
Jon
Have you checked out Astro-Physics website? Roland Christen has a good explanation of the processes that he uses to make his scopes. Of course when it comes to AP scopes, you cannot really put a price on his labor and he does the final figure on all the objectives.
Regarding the expense of the mounts. Precision machining costs some real money. Machining gears with low periodic error is expensive, the tolerances are small. For example if one is machining an 8 inch diameter gear, the maximum error can be no more than about 0.0005 inch, or about 1/8th the thickness of a human hair.
Once someone told Ted Williams that he was having trouble hitting inside fastballs and asked Ted what he should do.
Ted answered: "Don't swing."
The same is true of those Tak mounts. If you don't want one, then buy a CG-5 or an Orion Atlas. They cost less....
If you want to know what it costs to make an AP scope, I suggest posting your question to the newsgroup Science.Astro.Amateur Roland Christen is active will probably surprise you with both the cost and with his frankness.
But I can tell you that these guys are not getting rich doing this, there is a large investment and a small return.
Jon
Funding Member
