Here’s an interesting problem. One of the guys at our local club (The Galway Astronomy Club) has a Skywatcher 6 inch F8 telescope provided on an EQ3-2 mount. His space is limited and setting up an equatorial mount takes time. He was looking for a quick setup, throw the mount and tube in a car and have a 5 minute setup at a dark site.

Conclusion: replace the eq mount with a dobsonian mount.

The tube is an f8 so the mount would still need to be quite tall to give it some swinging room. Having built a 12.5″ F6 truss-tube dobsonian this mount should be alot easier to build. Obviously one thing that would need to be taken into account is the need for some way to mount this solid tube telescope to the mount. Luckily we can build two bearings that will attach to the tube rings that came with the telescope. This gives the added benefit of being able to

1. Change the balance point as needed based on whatever equipment he has mounted
2. Rotate the if he needs to without having to rebalance

So here are the details: