How to build a stand for a Dobsonian telescope

London got an Orion XT4.5 for his birthday last week. We’ve had it out a couple of times and it is an awesome scope. It strongly reminds me of my old XT6–the XT4.5 is a bit smaller, but probably not as much as you’d think from looking at photos of it. It’s solid, moves well, and the optics are great.

It is, however, too short. Even for London, and he’s just a bit over 4 feet tall. Clearly, we needed to get the scope up off the ground. The first night out, just to test potential setups, I put the scope up on an old plastic milk crate. This is the heaviest, sturdiest milk crate I’ve ever seen, and the scope still rocked back and forth on it. We needed a 3-legged solution.

Now, Orion makes a dedicated Dob stand that is really nice. It has grooves instead of divots to accommodate Dobs of many sizes. It also costs about $145, which I think is stark raving lunacy for 4 pieces of wood that any idiot could screw together.

The Dob stand I am about to show you will also accommodate any size of Dob, as long as you build it that way. It also costs next to nothing. For me it was precisely nothing since I used old crap I found in the garage: wood from a long-defunct futon (the same futon that gave some of its physical body to my old DIY Dob base), some metal shelf supports from a project that never got off the ground, screws from my “spare screw” box, and the modest tools I already owned, namely a saw and a handheld drill.

Step zero was to have London sit in one of the folding chairs that we use when we go camping or up Mount Baldy to stargaze, then set up the XT4.5 in front of him on the floor, pointing straight up, and measure the vertical distance between the eyepiece and his eye. As always when building anything to do with a Dob, it’s better to skew low–it’s always easier to bend down an extra inch to get to the the eyepiece at the horizon than it is to lift your butt an extra inch when the scope is pointed straight up. My rough target height for the stand was about 6 inches.

Conceptually this thing is dead simple: it’s just a ‘T’ of wood, reinforced on either side with the shelf supports. I figured out the dimensions by putting the XT4.5 down on a big sheet of paper and tracing the feet, and then laying the wood down on the paper sheet and tracing the cuts that I would need to make.

Once I had the basic T-shape together, I set the XT4.5 on it and traced the feet again, directly onto the wood, then used a spade bit to drill out some depressions. The spade bit has a triangular tooth at the center that cuts a deeper hole, and that became the pilot hole for the screw that holds each leg on. So the legs are precisely below the feet of the Dob for maximum strength and stability.

In addition to the big screws that run down their long axes, the legs are reinforced with small angle brackets. These are probably overkill, but I wanted to build this thing once and then not worry about it for the next decade or two. In retrospect, angling the two “back” legs toward the center might have been smarter than making them parallel to the cross-bar. But like I said, this thing is probably over-built as it is.

The last step was to paint it with a couple of coats of black primer, which I also had lying around in the garage. The black paint definitely classes it up a bit. From a few feet away in the dark, you might even mistake it for something that had shipped with the scope.

How does it work? Wonderfully. I took care when I used the spade bit to cut the depressions so that the feet of the XT4.5 just fit inside their outer edges. Once the XT4.5 is settled in place, it will not slide or rock at all; it practically snaps in. You’d have to knock it over to get the ground board to move. You can grab the tube and swing it all over the sky and the ground board and stand stay put. And there’s no detectable vibration. The legs are each 5 1/4″ long and the T is 7/8″ thick, so the height is acceptably close to my “roughly six inches” goal. More importantly, London is able to observe comfortably while seated, whether he’s looking at Polaris low in the northern sky or the Andromeda galaxy dead overhead (and it was the other night, too, darn near straight up).

There is one final addition I want to make before I call it done: I want to sink a cap nut into the bottom of each leg. That way I can screw bolts of various lengths into the legs to make smaller feet. The stand as built does not rock on any surface on which I have tried it (driveway concrete, grass, and gravel so far), but the bottoms of the legs are long enough that it potentially could. Using bolts as feet would make the contact patches smaller and reduce the opportunity for rocking. Plus, that way the stand can grow with London: as he gets taller, we can swap out the foot-bolts for progressively taller pieces. I’d use cap nuts instead of T-nuts so the support bolts couldn’t punch through and damage the wood.* With a bigger Dob, I might put on casters. In fact, the swiftness and ease with which this thing came together–I did essentially everything but paint it in one afternoon–has got me thinking about building a rolling unit for the XT10. If that ever happens, you’ll read about it here.

* It just occurred to me as I was finishing this post that if it wouldn’t have upset London to start hacking on his brand-new scope, I could have sunk cap nuts into the ground board of the XT4.5 itself, and put long threaded bolts straight into them to make feet. If I ever get an XT4.5 of my own, I’ll probably do exactly that.**

** It further occurred to me after the post went up that the ground board already has threaded holes for the rubber feet, which have embedded bolts and screw in from the bottom. So in fact if I had thought it through I probably could have skipped the whole Dob stand entirely and just screwed 6-inch-long bolts into the ground board; if the included rubber feet are loafers, those long bolts would be stiletto heels. I haven’t actually tested that setup, mind you, but it seems like it ought to work.

If you don’t have a bunch of crap lying around in your garage, you can probably still build something like this for under $20, maybe less than half that if you can scrounge the wood. If you don’t have metal shelf supports and don’t want to spring for them, you could cut pieces of wood to reinforce each side of the ‘T’ diagonally. Painting is optional, the thing works just as well in its unpainted ugly state. If your woodworking skills are like mine–nearly nonexistent–you can also use the unpainted unit to make your carpenter friends cry. Have fun!