Quote Originally Posted by Tom M King View Post
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".
My original intent was to make a simple Dobsonian base. But then I got the idea to make the GEM mount and suddenly things got complicated! Motorizing the mount was never in the plan but I thought I should build it in a manner that would allow for a retrofit at some point. I will never do this myself but future owners might want to. I have gone so far as to play with a design for a worm gear and stepper motor arrangement that would hide inside the shaft tubes. There just might be enough room inside the 6" diameter shaft tubes to make this work. But that's going to be a project for someone in the future!