I’ll start dropping into own shops. Is your experience with collimation that it tends to be a couple hundred to fix?
First, 100% of the would-be collimation practitioners on the Internet address Conditional Alignment and not 3-axis collimation; there are important differences!
10 years ago, I charged $120 an hour with a 1 hour minimum. That was the LETTER of the law to keep the know-it-all cheapskates outta my hair. It was a great rock to hide behind that cut down on negativity while I got my work done. In reality, I worked by the SPIRIT of the law that allowed my to do many freebees that other professionals charged for. For SOME of the military stuff, I HAD to charge that much. But usually, I found a loophole for them, too. I was repeatedly told I couldn’t make a profit doing things the way I did. I laughed all the way to the bank and had a great and loyal customer cadre. The attachment came from the business section of a town 30 miles away.
“Success is not the key to happiness; happiness is the key to success.” — Albert Schweitzer
Contact Cory Suddarth of S.O.R. in Henryetta, Oklahoma. I think you’ll find $200 considerably more than needed. Besides, Cory saw a binocular ... once. It was in a magazine ... but, whatever. He’s the best we have, at least until I hang out a shingle, again. Then, he goes back to being optical dog meat!
But Cory KNOWS those differences and has the equipment and procedure to give you the “full meal deal.” :cat:
Bill
PS The following is from a book I’m not allowed to mention:
“ ... Fellow shipmate and former Navy Opticalman, Cory Suddarth, was with me the day I took a call from a fellow who had been a repair manager at his company for many years. The essence of his call went something like this:
“I just don’t understand it; I’ll get the binocular collimated but when I move one of the barrels, it’s off again.”
“He was right; he didn’t understand it. He was a conscientious technician but, being unfamiliar with the basics of 3-axis collimation and following today’s popular but flawed alignment techniques, he and his staff had been selling CoAl as collimation to his repair customers all those years. It was this experience that caused me to first suggest there’s a big difference between 20 years of experience and one year of experience 20 times.”
