Tripod Modification

The stock tripod that came with my Telescope is ok but it't not very solid and I think it can be improved.

The hollow legs of the tripod can increase vibrations making the image in view shake around after you have touched the telescope, for a beginner this can be quite frustrating, especially if your manually tracking Jupiter at high magnification at the same time! 

Many people have suggested filling the legs with sand or even lead shot! well I still wanted to actually move my telescope so I looked around for something else, builders expanding foam was one idea but I didn't have any, but I did have access to plenty of news paper.

illustration of the individual tripod leg.

I decided to ack the 2 outside legs with newspaper all the way, and the central adjustable leg of the tripod I filled the lower part with lead shot and sand up about 10cm and the rest with newspaper.

The newspaper will absorb any vibrations in the tripod and with the centre leg being weighted will help increase stability.

newspaper is simply rammed into the aluminuim tripod tubes

I made my own lead shot by casting small thin
ingots then cutting them up with tin snips 

I used a small wooden square dowel and rammed the shredded newspaper in, every so often i would give it a few whacks with a hammer to make sure it was all in nice and snug.

I cast small ingots of lead and and cut them small, when I added them to the tube I also added a small amount of sand to fill any gaps between the lead shot. Then rammed the rest of the tube with newspaper all the way to the top. a word of caution lead is toxic be careful!!

The weight of the tripod has roughly doubled as each leg weighed about 600g before the mod and now weigh 1.2kg after but this is considerably lighter than if I filled it with just sand! I didn't have access to builders expanding foam and dont know how well that would work. Another method is to stuff the legs with wet newspaper and dry in an oven, my tripod had plastic parts riveted to it so i didn't do that also i think the newspaper would shrink inside the tube.

I think this is the best method apart from having a wooden tripod, which may be a future build, 

The result is a pretty sturdy feeling tripod I look forward to getting out and using it properly

Hope this has helped or inspired 

HK