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Home | Quickcams in Space | The On-going Dome House Project | Custom Optical Encoders on CG-5 |
Modifying the CG-5 Worm Gear | Correcting some of the CG-5's Irritations

Wooden Legs for the CG-5
After regreasing this is the second best modification you can make. I tried the option of filling the legs with sand. It works, but one is left with a very heavy mount tripod to lug about. I put off the upgrade to wooden legs for some time because of the cost. Many of the commercial wooden leg kits cost nearly as much as the CG-5 mount was worth. It's possible to build your own legs for a reasonable price. Click here to see how Jim Mueller did it.
I was about to follow Mueller's example then I found the TeleHoon site. Hoon, a Canadian dealer, listed wooden sets of replacement legs from $65 to $75 shipped. You can see a picture of the legs at the front page of the site. They come with a combination spreader and accessory tray. The legs I received were unfinished pine. At the time I ordered, Hoon was having to increase the price because of strong U.S. dollar and shipping costs. Take note: These are not the furniture grade quality legs that some people are supplying for the CG-5. But they are affordable and with a little bit of sanding and stain can be made to look pretty good.
The accessory tray isn't much, though being a one-piece metal assembly it is very stable. The tray has holes that look like they're made to hold 1 1/4 inch eyepieces but they're a bit undersized and my eyepeices won't fit.
So I added my old tray. Because of the design of the TeleHoon tripod, I had to build mounting blocks that I could screw the old tray to. Note from the picture (click on it to see a larger version) that the blocks are glued and screwed to one side of the top leg sections only. This allows the two top sections to spread for height adjustment. I feared this wouldn't be strong enough, but I've had no problems yet. Getting the new tray level was a chore. I used small c-clamps to hold the blocks in place and mark the screw-holes while leveling the tray.
Other notes: I sold the old aluminum legs, sans the accessory tray, for $35 plus shipping on Astromart. Amazing, but I had three or four offers in the first day. Seems a lot of people have use for such things to finish up homebuilt projects. Because the mounting bolts are larger, one also has to drill out the bolt holes on the aluuminum tripod base to 3/8 inch. This is not a big deal; it takes a few minutes with a hand drill and the larger bolts add more stability. As I mentioned above, last I heard, TeleHoon was raising prices somewhat.