tailgate & float

One of my primary non-work activities has been designing a large telescope. This was inspired by reading about William Herschel in the recently paperback-ed "Age of Wonder", and subsequently by buying Dave Kriege's tantalizingly detailed "The Dobsonian Telescope". On the basis of these things, I decided to start constructing one of my own, a 16" alt-az newt reflector, aka Dobsonian. The first stage involves some metal fabrication, and since I (unfortunately) do not know how to weld/drill/cut metal I have had to prepare some documentation to communicate with people who do. The tailgate and float are the first part of this system. I'm shopping around for fabricators now, so hopefully these will actually get made sometime soon! QCAD is very fun too.