Sky & Telescope - August 2024 - 74

ASTRONOMER'S WORKBENCH by Jerry Oltion
The BucketSeat
Binocular
Mount
Make an attractive yet robust observing tool.
WHEN LAUREN WINGERT inherited
a pair of 25×100 binoculars, she also
inherited a problem. There's no way
you can hold 25× optics steady by hand,
and when those optics weigh 10 pounds
there's no way you can hold them at
all for more than a minute or two. As
Lauren says, " All you really want to do
when holding them is set them down!
They're nearly unusable without some
sort of robust mount. "
Binocular mounts abound, but few
have a 10-pound capacity, and the ones
that do are expensive. It became immediately
clear that Lauren had another
ATM project on her hands: building a
mount for these immense binos.
Since the binoculars were free to
begin with, she wanted to build a
mount that was both stable and lowcost.
Lauren says, " I had seen 'zerogravity
chairs' that used some sort of
pipe-mount thing next to the chair.
Those looked to be a pain to move in
azimuth. Get up, move everything,
reset. " She wanted something that
would rotate around the azimuth axis
along with the chair.
Lauren found an adjustable gaming
chair for about $100. It swiveled,
reclined, and had metal armrests she
could mount an arm on. For the arm
she spent $40 on a computer-monitor
mount rated at 30 pounds. Attaching it
to the chair was a simple matter of bolt
Right: A gaming chair used as a prototype
swiveled and tilted - but it also shook, shimmied,
and was awkward to use. Far right: Lauren
tried tripod legs for extendable booms, but
the weight of the binoculars made them bind.
74 AUGUST 2024 * SKY & TELESCOPE
Lauren Wingert's
bino-chair uses a
car seat and a monitor
arm to hold her
10-pound binoculars
in a comfortable
observing position.
ing it to one of the armrests. And hey
presto! She had a shaky mess. The chair
arms flexed from side to side. The rotating
ring wobbled. And worst of all, in
order to recline the chair she had to tilt
it forward first to disengage the ratchet.
Try that with 10-pound binoculars
hanging in front of your face and you'll
increase your vocabulary.
The monitor arm worked like a
charm. It had good up/down, tilt, and
in/out motions while easily holding
the binoculars' weight. It was just the
chair that, shall we say, disappointed.
Lauren kept her eye out for something
else, and one day at work she noticed
a car's bucket seat in storage. Her boss
was happy to see it go, so Lauren took
it home for free. And thus began the
bino-chair do-over and a quest for
stability. Lauren reports, " The idea of
a more stable chair was appealing, but
the whole thing became one engineering
problem after another to overcome.
It was a lesson in physics, stability, trial
and error, do-overs, and multiple fixes. "
The first order of business was to
make the chair swivel. That was fairly
easily accomplished by the use of a
lazy-Susan bearing sandwiched between
ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF LAUREN WINGERT
Sky & Telescope - August 2024

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