I bought my first Cave in 1978. It was an 8" f/6 Astrola. Two years later I traded it for a 13.1 Odyssey. In 1998 after 15 years without a scope I decided I wanted an old Cave like the one I had. At the time there was still being published a periodical called "The Starry Messenger". In there I finally found what I wanted and could afford. It was a 10" f/4.5 Astrola with 1.5" shafts, dec gears and, rotating rings. Also the mirror and diagonal had been recently re-coated by QSP. The price with shipping was only $800. I sent out a check and eagerly awaited my scope. What arrived two weeks later was a disaster. I almost dumped the whole thing in the trash. First, a well known shipping company (think three letter acronym) had bounced one of the boxes so hard that the cast aluminum cradle for the OTA was snapped in two. The mount was either in a flood or had been left outside under a downspout for 20 years. The counter weights were rusted to the shaft. I needed a 10lb hammer to remove them. Both axles were frozen to their bearings. The iron gears in the clock drive motor had disintegrated. The prior owner had loosened the bolts that retained each axle in order to be able to point the scope!

After much agonizing, I decided I was going to restore this scope. On the plus side the glass looked good and, it did come with two original Cave Galoc eyepieces, a UO 28mm wide field plus a 2.4x Dakin barlow. All the metal components (except for the broken cradle) seemed to be sound. A local welder did a great job using heli-arc to repair the cradle. I scrubbed, cleaned, primed and, painted all the metal parts. The fiberglass tube cleaned up well. I added a nice 2" crayford focuser, and new motors to work with the both axles. The original clock drive used a 1 RPM motor with a 10-tooth spur gear. I couldn’t find this spur gear so I used a 30-tooth spur with a 1/3 RPM motor. I was able to get a quartz controlled drive corrector that works with synchronous motors on both axes. Bear in mind that I live in a small 1-bedroom apartment. This project completely dominated my apartment for over two months. Pieces were everywhere. Painted parts drying, gears being cleaned, aluminum brackets being made, etc. Would you believe I spent over $50.00 just on new fasteners?

All this work finally resulted in a 200lb beauty. I wrapped the tube in aluminized Mylar to see if it would keep dew off the scope. I don’t know how well this works but I haven’t yet had any dew problems, and it looks so cool. The performance is wonderful. It has enough light gathering power to work very well with my homemade binoviewer. I can clearly see the shadows of Jupiter’s moons. For some reason it’s easier for me to observe this with the binoviewer than a single eyepiece. The star test looks good too. It seems to take and hold its collimation well. The double double in Lyra is resolved and, deep sky objects look great too. The drive system works pretty well. Once it’s polar aligned I didn’t have much trouble keeping a star in the cross hairs.

I received some very good advice from the people in the Astromart.com forum. I found out that my mirror was signed along the edge. I hadn’t noticed it before. It says "M.H.CAIN 1968 fl: 45 3/8"".

Mark S. Millen