I believe you are referring to silicone grease. I have the same finder but typically the scope it is used on is mounted alt-az, so my crosshair orientation doesn't change. For my equatorial finder, I use a commercial 25mm illuminated cross-hair eyepiece that has a 1.25" barrel, and is easily rotated and re-secured with the eyepiece-holder's set-screw. What about a very short, flat spring that would fit around the eyepiece threads? A washer made of spring steel, with a slight kink in it? Or a neoprene or sorbothane gasket that would hold the eyepiece in position even though the threads might not be bottomed-out tight. On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 5:50 PM, Canopus56 <canopus56@yahoo.com> wrote:

I am rebuilding my Orion right angle finder to make it more accurate and enjoyable to use. The finder scope is fine, but the holder is some ill-designed, bad-manufactured nightmare that flops a good 1/2 to 1 degree after a meridian flop.

Having fixed the play in the holder, I would like to make one more improvement to the cross-hairs of the right-angle finder scope. I prefer to align my finder's cross hairs along the RA and Dec orientation. That simplifies moving the target object into the center of the crosshairs using a handcontroller. The target moves left or right or up and down parallel to the crosshairs depending on which handcontroller buttons are pushed. This aids moving the target into the TFOV of the observing eyepiece. Since the finder is a right-angle, I cannot simply rotate the entire finder body. That moves the finder eyepiece to an inconvenient position.

What I would like to do is to rotate the finder's combined eyepiece and cross-hairs by having the finder eyepiece adjustable. It only needs to rotate at most 90 degrees. Right know the finder eyepiece is designed to screw home to a fixed immoveable position.

I was thinking, rather than drilling and taping a set screw, that I could just use some sticky grease to increase the "sticktion" action on the finder's eyepiece. That way I could rotate the finder eyepiece to the right orientation and have it stay there. I have seen such "grease" on other parts of telescopes. It is a very thick grease-like substance that does not change viscosity much with temperature.

What is the material that I am looking for? What is it called? Where can I buy it? Or am I imaging that "sticktion" grease exists as an ATM material? Or is there another simply solution that does not involve my die and tap set that I have overlooked?