The same thing happend to me, my DS80 fell over in a freak windstorm.

Anyway, I pulled the drawtube out, and looked at where the teeth
were missing. I then fashioned some replacements with strip styrene
from a hobby shop, and glued them on with super glue. That was 4
years ago, and it still works like a champ.

Dan

On Wed, May 23, 2007 10:00 am, Tony Miller wrote:
> Jerry,
>
> I did look at replacement focusers, and, well, my budget isn't up
> for a $100+ focuser -- need it all for gas to get to dark sky sites
> (durn Jeep at 14mpg, thinking about dumping it soon).
>
> The current focuser has worked well enough for me -- I may just
> remove it to see if I can't reverse the tube or graft a section of
> the teeth from way up the tube where they're never used. All my
> focusing tends to be within the first two inches of the six-inch
> drawtube. I'm only missing a total of three "teeth" from the
> drawtube, two in one spot, one in the another -- where it happened
> to be seated when it got dumped off the porch.
>
> I've found the drawtube on the Meade 4504 is the same, but it's
> about three inches shorter since it goes on a Newt. Pretty sure the
> DS70 or DS80 focuser would be the same 2" chromed plastic drawtube,
> so one of those would work as well. Anyone?
>
> Tony M
> central OH
>
> --- In Meade-DS-Telescopes@yahoogroups.com, Jerry <crazyj1251@...>
> wrote:
>>
>> Tony,
>> Sounds to me like a blessing in disguise. Why not just
>> replace that cheap plastic geared focuser with a nice
>> crayford while you are at it. There are nice one and
>> two speed crayford focusers for sale at scopestuff,
>> agena and a few other places for under $150. Those
>> stock focusers are junk and a good crayford will
>> really fix that scope.
>> Jerry in Arizona
>>
>>
>
>
>
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
>


--
Daniel Holmes, danielh@...
"Laugh while you can, monkey boy!" -- Lord John Whorfin