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My pride and joy - the Unitron 4 inch f/15 equatorial refractor. Here you see the telescope pointing at the Moon in my observatory. Notice the 60mm x 900mm Unitron guide scope attached.  I had one of these attached onto the 4 inch telescope until I got lucky to be able to secure the actual 60mm x 700 guide telescope.  You will see it later as you scroll down. This particular one was purchased from a friend of mine that also loves Unitron and Cave Telescopes. The person that owned it even before this fellow I bought it from, made a fine motor drive for this telescope. It is secured in place by the declination bolt. No alterations were done to the original telescope to accommodate this drive. Respectfully so, I call it the Breedon Drive, named after its designer and also machined by him. Here is the 60mm x 700mm guide telescope. In no time at all, I desired to have this telescope upgraded to the full Model 160. So, I needed a Unibalance assembly too. Well that was next to impossible to obtain. So after much searching on the Yahoo Groups, I found someone there in the Unitron Telescopes Group that was nice enough to give me all the exact measurements of the Unibalance weight, and rod.  I went right to work!  After doing much "Google-ing" around the web I found some end user/suppliers of small stock metals. So I purchased some SAE-1010 carbon steel bar round and Type-304 stainless steel rod to make this assembly.   See the photo below: As time went on, I got lucky again...this time I managed to secure the Weight Drive.   Now this is a real showpiece.  The brass governor spins as weights, held onto a cable pull the cable off the drive wheel by means of gravity. This in turn moves a series of gears inside this unit. The speed is regulated by means of the weights on the governor. It is simply wonderful to watch this work. Well, when I got this unit, there were parts missing too!  For instance, I needed more weights. I didn't have the whole set. So back to the website to buy some 4 inch bar round carbon steel again. The company I bought the steel from, cut it to just the sizes I needed.  A friend of mine that runs his own machine shop gladly drilled the holes and made the slots so I could slide the weights onto the cable and beveled the edges for me too. All I needed to do there was paint them with a black wrinkle finish. The metal tray was in horrid condition. I sanded the surface smooth and painted that with Rust Oleum primer and over coated it with Black Satin Finish. Another very good friend of mine, made the brackets for me that are attached to the tripod.  These parts are all replicas of the original missing parts.  Thank goodness for the friends on CloudyNights.com and the Unitron Group on Yahoo Groups. They helped by giving us the necessary pieces of information to build these parts. Here are some more shots of the various parts and various angles of this beautiful telescope. No, I do NOT use those crazy sun filters. But I do use the one on the right only when I use the Herschel Wedge. I have a Unitron Herschel Wedge too.  I got it all Unitron!! No, the objective is not defective...just dusty. It needs a cleaning.  One of these days I will get around to doing that!! Now here is a shot of the Moon I took with the Unitron! Copyright © 2007 Len Marek's Astronomy Webpage. All rights reserved. Last Updated December 19, 2007