Today I was crawling around in an attic as I was running a control wire when I came across a strange object underneath some insulation. The part of the attic I was in didn't have anything else in it, so I cleared the insulation and found a wooden box about 2.5 ft long, 1 high, and 7" wide. I set it aside and finished what I was doing. Before closing up the attic I asked the homeowner if she knew it was there. She said "no" so I brought it down. We opened it up and found an old 234 power Japanese made telescope.

Cool! She didn't remember it and told me I could take it otherwise she was going to junk it. It didn't look to be in good shape, but I took it home.

It's in pretty rough shape.... dirty lenses and mirrors. But hey, it'll give me something to do tonight. I'll see if I can clean it up any and if I can use it. It'll likely be to dirty to look at the stars, but maybe I can check out the moon.

I've been meaning to get telescope. I had one a few years back that I thoroughly enjoyed.

You never know what you'll find in old attics!

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(Sent via iPhone so please forgive any typing errors)

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- The Federalist #46 -

Now we know what you told your wife, but where did you really get it??

Making of a peeping Tom.

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Memory of Randy Freas-Rimfired

That's a pretty cool find. When I was a young man working for my father in law we did a small remodeling job for a customer, and found a very old muzzle loader buried between the studs in a wall we tore down. The wall was old enough that it was made of actual 2x4 oak lumber. Turns out the rifle was about 69 caliber and dad got some lead balls for it somewhere, but he wanted to clean it before we tried shooting it.
He was the sort of fellow that would slice off a thin
disc of dynamite on the 4th of July and smack it with a sledgehammer, so it didn't bother him at all to clamp the dismounted action in a shop vice and heat the breach plug with a torch to loosen it up. Imagine our surprise when after a little bit of heat the rifle fired, sending an old lead ball out the rear wall of the shop and through both walls of the barn behind it. As I remember it he didn't even flinch, just sort of wandered out to the barn real nonchalant like to make sure none of the cows had been hit.
We never did get the breach plug out, and I was the first person to fire the rifle on purpose. It was actually pretty mild to fire, but you couldn't hit much with it.
Your find reminded me of a fun day long ago, thanks. Enjoy the telescope!

Haha no no it's the truth. However I AM now looking at
telescopes online.

I'm thinking my next gun purchase might be delayed and replaced by a telescope purchase....

__________________
- The Federalist #46 -

Um, my iPhone fixes typing errors automatically. If your typing is that screwed up its you, not your iPhone.

Haha it gets typos but not grammatical errors or wrong words. I find that I often type "if" instead of "of". Plus the autocorrect can produce some off the wall corrections.

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- The Federalist #46 -

got to be alot of insulation in that attic,that ain't no small box.you should have felt around more,you might have found a bicycle or something.

Yeah, I'm just goofing with ya.
My fat finger mistypes the "i" and "o" frequently. Some fool put them right next to each other.
Plus autocorrect always wants to "fix" Patridge sight and make it "Partridge".

Possibly! It was blown in on top of an older layer. Someone did a horrible job.

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- The Federalist #46 -

Get some good lens paper, like Zeiss and Bausch & Lomb sell. I get the B&L stuff at a grocery store, in the pharmacy area. It's mainly for eyeglasses.

Don't clean the lenses while dry. Don't pour lens drops onto the lens. Moisten the cloth instead.

If it was hot in that attic, your internal lenses and prisms are probably cloudy, too. Even the factory might not be able to clean them.

Used optics often have fogged lenses and prisms. To check, use a bright flashlight on the ocular lens(es) and look through the objective lens. Look around in there and if it looks cloudy, don't buy that instrument.

I learned the hard way after buying a Zeiss 8X30 monocular made about 1960. It seemed dimmer than expected, so after reading about this test, I realized that it was dirty inside. Zeiss USA cleaned it up a lot, but couldn't remove all the residue coated onto the glass from vaporized seals due to high heat. DON'T store your camera, binocular, etc. in a hot car! Or, attic!

What brand is the scope? If it's a Meade or Celestron, etc., it may be worth cleaning up. If it's a Jason or something like that, maybe not. You can look for their ads in Astronomy and in Sky and Telescope and contact the US importer for repair data.

In the first picture, it looks to be Tasco.

You can use it to look at the Moon, Venus and Mars but you'll need a mirror to see Uranus.

What's the diameter of the objective lens? Some of these things are no bigger than a 50mm binocular lens, and the eyepieces are often overpowered for the light the scope will transmit. The field of view is then very limited.

I once found a set of WWI dog tags in the attic of an old house that was being torn down. I was a teenager at the time and didn't think much of it. I put them in an old tool box along with a few other keepsakes and forgot about it. About 40 years later I was in my cruiser excorting a funeral. I saw the last name "Venable" on a tombstone and remembered the name on the dog tags. I went back to the graveyard after the funeral had cleared out to look at the rest of the headstone. There laid the former owner of the dog tags. He had died in his early 30's. I did some research and found that he had a relative that I knew. She was the wife of a former Mississippi governor who had served back in the 60's.

I gave her a call and told her what I had and that I wanted to bring them over and give them to her. When I got there she and several surviving family members were waiting. They were very happy to get the dog tags. She gave me some history on the soldier. He never married and she was one of his few living relatives. He had served in France and was gassed by the Germans. The gas didn't kill him right then but he suffered from the affects of it for the rest of his shortened life. She had no idea why the dog tags were where I found them.

I'm a home inspector so I've been in a lot of attics and crawlspaces. I keep hoping I'll find an old coffee can full of gold coins but no luck so far. A few years ago I was in an attic and saw a couple of well-worn and dusty pump shotguns. They were uncased, lying on some cardboard and pretty dusty looking. I told the homeowner (a young, metro-sexual kind of guy) that he might want to store them elsewhere. He didn't know what I was talking about and had never been in his attic. So I guess a prior owner had left them. I hope they didn't end up atsome buy-back scheme. I did find a ballpoint pen in a crawlspace once. Some plumbing company give-away. Nice pen.

I used to fix appliances for a living. I once found an envelope behind a refrigerator and gave it to the home owner. I was a check for $1800 from an insurance company and a few years old. I had a follow up visit there some time later and learned she got a new check issued and cashed. She was happy.

When I was a kid in the 1950s I and a friend were playing under a road bridge. There was a lot of trash dumped there and we were checking it out. There was a gunny sack with what we thought were bed rails sticking out of it. What it really was was two model 1906 Winchester .22s and two model 1887 lever action 10 gauge shotguns. There also was a lot of paper work including a marriage license. Being the good kids we were we took it to the gunsmith that they were stolen from. He was so pleased he gave us each a half box of .410 shells. I'm 74 now and still question my honesty.