Components for truss tubes

As a supplement to my well-known and popular full tubes made of hard-paper, I do also offer a system for building truss tubes.

Truss tubes are used very often for constructing a large telescope. Especially when building a Dobson, a truss tube makes more sense than a full-tube, since they are separable to make a large instrument portable at all.
At the same weight, a truss tube is much more rigid as full-tube, or vise versa: Can be built much lighter at the same stiffness.In addition to that, the truss structure provides only a very small surface against the wind.
Since the position of the focus can be changed easily by using tubes of different lengths, binocular-viewers and other items with huge backfocus can be used without any problems.

For a stiff construction, the rods must be connected to form Triangles. This results in the known structures of six or eight rods. The rods are inserted into terminal blocks in the mirror box and clamped. At the front-cage, the fittings are connected to the rods, and two fittings are bolted together at a mounting-point at the secondary cage.

The system presented here is based on tubes with 30mm outer diameter and wall thickness of 1.5 mm (1 to 2 mm are possible). With these tubes an extremely rigid tube with low weight can be realized. The fittings are designed to connect two rods to each other symmetrically. The terminal blocks are designed for the lower end without the need for a clamping a tool: Wing handles, etc. are sufficient. The fittings are made with large holes to save as much material and to reduce the weight as far as possible.