I am building a Scope Buggy so I can move my set up from the garage to the backyard without having to disassemble everything. Setting up my rig is not that hard but it takes several trips to the garage. First I have to disassemble everything, move the mount, then move the weights, then move the optical tube assembly, move all the accessories, and then get everything level and rebalanced.

The plan here is to build a cart to allow me to move everything from the garage to the observing spot in the backyard while keeping it assembled. I am not building this from any plans just mostly working it out in my head as I go based on other designs I have seen. Trying to keep it simple… but what fun is that. This post is part 1 of the build, not sure how many parts there will be but eventually it will be finished.

I picked up some 2″ square tube from JR Enterprises, a local metal supplier. I am figuring it is going to take less than 8′ for the build. The spread between the CG5 tripod legs is 32″. So I cut the long leg of the base to 36″, the short leg is 28″. This give me about 2″ past each of the legs.

I laid the cut square tube and squared it up. The made sure everything lined up with the tripod.

After checking the layout I moved the two pieces of the base to the welding table, squared everything up again, and welded the short leg of the base centered on the long leg.

My welds did not look too bad, but I ground them down clean anyway just to give it a finished look. The whole thing will get painted once it is finished.

Then I cut holes in each end for the tripod legs. The largest drill bit I had was 1/2″ so I drilled two half inch holes centered 2 1/4″ and 2 3/4″ in from the ends and then used a grinder and a Dremel to get them large enough for each of the tripod feet to fit into.

The mount is on there nice and sturdy, still need to clean up the holes but I think it is going to work just fine.

I am going to head over to Harbor Freight after Christmas to pick up some wheels, I am planning to use 6″ pneumatic wheels. Then I’ll build and weld on wheel plates. I also plan to add leveling feet but I haven’t figured out exactly how I am going to do those yet.

I like it… stay tuned for the progress.