While many of you who are new to astronomy may have never heard of Tectron Telescopes, from 1983 to 1999 Tectron built around two hundred large telescopes for amateurs from around the world. While our smallest production model was a 15", most of the telescopes built were 20" and larger. Tectron Machine Corporation is a machine shop in Sarasota, Florida. Tom Clark founded it, and ran it until he sold it and retired in 1997. While Tectron's main business was building replacement parts for military aircraft, we also produced collimation tools, clamp blocks and truss tubes, mirror cells, and the first low-profile rack-and-pinion focusers available for amateur telescope makers..
Tom wrote many telescope making articles for Sky and Telescope, Astronomy, and Telescope Making magazines. He also founded Amateur Astronomy Magazine in 1994 and published it until retiring in 2007. Tom's book The Modern Dobsonian has been in print since 1992, and was completely revised in 2004. It is still available, and for anyone interested in building their own telescope it is a must read. It covers everything from small travel scopes to the largest Dob you can imagine. Also, at the bottom of the Modern Dobsonian web page is a dozen articles on telescopes and observing.

