Hadley Tripod Quick Release Adapter

After I printed Maff's Hadley telescope, I needed to find a way to mount it.  A rocker box seemed like a good option, but I didn't have lumber available, or time to spend in the shop building it.  But I did have an old tripod with an arca-swiss style clamping ball head.  And a bit of modeling later, and I had this basic arca swiss adapter plate.

This was sized for the head that came with my Manfrotto Element tripod.  I expect it wouldn't take much tweaking to get it to fit a similar quick release plate.

Please use this at your own risk--your tripod and telescope may not work in this configuration based on weight of each, grip strength of the head, etc.  Mine is fine, but at one point during testing I did find that it helped to have a weighted bag on my tripod's bag hook to increase mass and reduce likelihood of tipping.

This mount is not as stable as a more heavily weighted option, and may be more prone to motion if you make contact with the tripod/eyepiece, but it's a very good (and very cheap) way to quickly get started if you don't have a better option available and you want to get started with the Hadley.  I tried to keep the hardware in line with the Hadley's hardware spec as much as possible and gave room for slightly taller bolt heads.

Feel free to Buy Me a Coffee if you like what I've done.

Hardware

5x 10-24 1 inch bolts and matching hex nuts.  The bolts can have whatever type of head you prefer as long as they fit the recesses.

Print Settings

I went overboard with my print because it's relatively small and I wanted to make sure it was going to hold the weight.  You can almost certainly reduce these, but test carefully if you do.

Note if you have screws with particularly large heads, you may want to try the model with extra clearance.

Instructions: Print with the flared sides up

Material: HTPLA (I suspect PETG would be better but I was prototyping with PLA and it holds up fine)

Layer Height: 0.3mm

Perimeters: 5

Bottoms: 5

Tops: 6