Flocking an Orion XT 8Posted By Jay Skuban |
David
Flocking the tube and blackening the secondary are two pretty good scope improvements. I just did my XT a few months ago. It was a good improvement and I'm pleased with the results. I did the whole tube after it became clear all the hardware was going to have to come off anyways.
I ordered the paper in the same length of my tube plus a little extra. It turned out the width of the paper was enough to cover the inside tube diameter of my 8" scope, but please double check this point. The next step was to take a deep breath and take all the hardware off the tube. Secondary, primary, spotter scope bracket, focuser, side attachments and the stiffener ring, all came off. What you have left is just the big metal tube. An opened portable workbench with a couple of towels tossed over it makes a good worktable.
I laid one piece of black double-sided indoor/outdoor carpeting tape down the tubes seam. This was my starting point for putting in the flocking paper. You don't need to be pretty with this stuff, once it's in, you don't notice imperfections, it's just BLACK. I got a helper and a dowel rod (boom handle) long enough to reach through the length of the tube. Used some masking tape to lightly attach the flocking paper to the dowel rod, and rolled it up with the sticky side out. We put it inside the tube and kept it suspended, with each of us at opposite ends. Did a couple of dry runs working out what we were going to do next and then just went for it. We lined up the edge with the double-sided carpet tape, pressed it into place. Then just started pealing and sticking. We found it was easier to rotate the tube as we went and work the paper gently from the inside out. The main objective was to avoid any "bubbles" in the paper. At the end, we simply over lapped the paper, took a straight edge and ran a razor knife to trim. Last thing was to trim the outside edges, focuser hole and all the other hardware holes and figure out how to use the excess flocking paper.
As long as it was disassembled, I darkened the edges of the secondary and ended up doing some of the primary. Painted the spider assembly ultra flat black and put back together. You could drop a shop light down in this thing and you couldn't tell if it was on or off.
The final step was to finally understand collimation, but that's a different story…
jay
Flocking the tube and blackening the secondary are two pretty good scope improvements. I just did my XT a few months ago. It was a good improvement and I'm pleased with the results. I did the whole tube after it became clear all the hardware was going to have to come off anyways.
I ordered the paper in the same length of my tube plus a little extra. It turned out the width of the paper was enough to cover the inside tube diameter of my 8" scope, but please double check this point. The next step was to take a deep breath and take all the hardware off the tube. Secondary, primary, spotter scope bracket, focuser, side attachments and the stiffener ring, all came off. What you have left is just the big metal tube. An opened portable workbench with a couple of towels tossed over it makes a good worktable.
I laid one piece of black double-sided indoor/outdoor carpeting tape down the tubes seam. This was my starting point for putting in the flocking paper. You don't need to be pretty with this stuff, once it's in, you don't notice imperfections, it's just BLACK. I got a helper and a dowel rod (boom handle) long enough to reach through the length of the tube. Used some masking tape to lightly attach the flocking paper to the dowel rod, and rolled it up with the sticky side out. We put it inside the tube and kept it suspended, with each of us at opposite ends. Did a couple of dry runs working out what we were going to do next and then just went for it. We lined up the edge with the double-sided carpet tape, pressed it into place. Then just started pealing and sticking. We found it was easier to rotate the tube as we went and work the paper gently from the inside out. The main objective was to avoid any "bubbles" in the paper. At the end, we simply over lapped the paper, took a straight edge and ran a razor knife to trim. Last thing was to trim the outside edges, focuser hole and all the other hardware holes and figure out how to use the excess flocking paper.
As long as it was disassembled, I darkened the edges of the secondary and ended up doing some of the primary. Painted the spider assembly ultra flat black and put back together. You could drop a shop light down in this thing and you couldn't tell if it was on or off.
The final step was to finally understand collimation, but that's a different story…
jay
