Sky and Telescope - March 2018 - 70

ASTRONOMER'S WORKBENCH by Jerry Oltion

A Stair-Climbing Scope Buggy
MOST OF US who observe from home

face the same dilemma: Do we take
apart the telescope every time we move
it inside or out, or do we try to transport it in one piece? Small scopes are
fairly easy to move as a unit, but it
doesn't take much size before the scope
and mount combination becomes too
cumbersome to handle. Even the mount
alone can be a chore when it's a big,
beefy equatorial head on a tripod.
Wheeled telescope buggies have long
been a solution to that problem, but
there's one serious shortcoming: They
don't go up and down stairs very easily.
Or do they?
Pittsburgh amateur Dennis Fisher
has ﬁgured out how to make a telescope
buggy climb stairs. The inspiration
came from a six-wheeled dolly he saw
in a movie that seemed to glide effort-

p The three-wheel assembly goes over stairs
like they weren't even there.

lessly up and down steps, but Dennis
was never able to come up with a decent
method for building the multi-wheel
assembly. "Then one day on Amazon
while looking for something else, I saw
a picture of a shopping cart with the
three-wheel assembly on it and thought

Dennis Fisher displays his stair-climbing telescope buggy.

M A RCH 2 018 * SK Y & TELESCOPE

. . . hmm." That particular unit was too
expensive ("I would have had to buy
$100 worth of carts to butcher them
for the wheel assemblies"), but at the
bottom of the screen was a list of spare
parts, and the wheel sets were perfectly
reasonable at $19 per pair. So Dennis
ordered two pair and set to work modifying his transporter.
He had already built a T-shaped buggy
similar to JMI's well-known design,
though as he says, "Not wanting to copy
the Wheeley Bar bit for bit, I just kept
the basic design in mind and went to
work. A hollow aluminum square tube
for the front, an aluminum angle for the
back, some angle brackets to hold the
wheels, shoulder bolts for axles, lawnmower wheels, and there it was." A very
simple, very light solution to the problem that's also strong enough to carry
40 pounds or more. The front wheel
support was probably the most complicated part, with bent-steel bars providing a gap that allows the front wheel
to steer, and a turnbuckle tensioner to
provide strength. Everything came from
a hardware store, and the most sophisticated tool necessary was a drill press.
The PVC pipe caps that hold the tripod leg tips look undersized in the photo,
but Dennis says they're just the right size
to hold the legs without slipping. Bungee
cords snug them tightly in place so they
don't go anywhere even when the buggy
is tilted for climbing stairs.
Dennis reports, "The addition of the
tri-wheel assemblies took a little modiﬁcation of the buggy, but not much. Now
when I go over the step, I can just pull it
along and the triple wheels will roll and
maintain contact with the ground and
the riser of the stair to make for smooth
transport over the stairs."
Problem solved! But transporting
the scope is only part of the buggy's

A LL IM AG ES BY DENNIS FISHER

Stairs and stars can play nice after all.

Sky and Telescope - March 2018

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Sky and Telescope - March 2018