Posts Made By: Jay Johnson

Hi Michael,

I've priced out building my own Dob more than once and it always comes out more expensive than buying one of the Chinese scopes. If you want to build it for fun that's okay, but don't expect it to come out cheaper.

The reason you may want to build your own scope is so that you can build it exactly the way you want it. What I ended up doing is buying a semi-custom scope from Discovery Telescopes. They were able to make all the modifications that I would have made if I were building my own. I wanted a Newt with a premium mirror, curved spider vanes, split sonotube, amd upgraded focuser. They were able to do all that for about the same price as I could have done it myself and saved me the hassle of buying all the components separately and putting it together (and possibly doing it wrong).

Regards,

Jay

Drill here...drill now. Oil is the engine that drives the economy. With the high gas prices, one of the governments major money makers (gas taxes) is on a decline with the decline of driving (down significantly from last year). Drilling in the US will have an immediate impact on gas prices because of speculators realizing that there will be another source of oil in the near future.

It's also important for our national security that we have our own oil resources rather than getting 70% of our oil from foreign sources. Russia would very much like to see Obama in office because he will weaken us militarily. The Russians are not dead as witnessed by their recent activity in Georgia. Look for further advances and threats coming from them. We cannot afford to be at the mercy of foreign oil.