Introducing the OMI Evolution-30 F/4.5 Dobsonian

October 6, 2008

For about a year now OMI has been developing and planning the introduction of a 30 inch Dobsonian telescope. We just made the first formal introduction of the scope at the Okie-Tex Star Party last week. At this point the scope exists only in virtual reality as CAD drawings. We will begin fabrication of the prototype this month and plan to demo the working prototype at the Texas Star Party in April of 2009.  I’ll post regular updates here as we work our way through the production of the first scope so stop by occasionally to see our progress.

This month at OMI we will successfully complete a production run of thirteen 30 inch F/4.5 primary mirrors, all made for Dave Kriege at Obsession Telescopes. When Dave and I first discussed making a run of 30 inch mirrors and scopes we were both a bit apprehensive about taking on the project. I expected that developing the process to fabricate the 2 inch thin mirrors would be a challenge, while handling the large scope parts would be a challenge for Dave’s shop.  In the end I found that scaling our process to produce the 30 inch mirrors was quite manageable and we were able to turn them out at a reasonable pace. It made sense for us to keep going. Dave, on the other hand, decided that this would be the last run of Obsession 30 inch scopes. After a bit of discussion we decided that OMI would take over making 30 inch Dobs, offering a scope that we would design and fabricate at OMI. Read more. . . .