Originally Posted by
Tom M King
I never owned a motorized one either, back when we were building telescopes, when I was a teenager in the '60's. We ground the optics, and everything else was just thrown together. My first one was a 4-1/4" f/15, and was just mounted on a 2x6 with the optic mounts hanging off the side. That one was not much good for anything but looking at the Moon, and was reground into a 4-1/4" f/4.
I have some Kodachrome slides I took, for exposures of like 20 minutes, using a handwheel on a flexible shaft, with the little 4-1/4", and an eye on the finder scope crosshairs following a star.
My friends, one that built telescopes with me when we were teenagers, are lead scientists on the James Webb (I sent them a link to your build). I ate dinner with a group of Astronomers, including these friends of mine, and some of the people who I had never met before asked me who I was. I said that I used to build telescopes with my friend when we were teenagers. He said, "Yeah, he still is".