A lesson for lazy builders.

Don't take your prototype out into a production environment.

1. If it gets broke, you no longer can back-engineer the working version from the prototype as most
of your fine tuning disappears.

2. Temporary fixes like heat sensitive adhesives tend to get forgotten about once the machine is
running sweetly and in use.

The story.

I took the AGUS to an airshow. In the hot sunlight (black paint didn't help), the glue softened and
the front fell out from the camera mount with a 500mm mirror lens on the mount, slowly like a
melted candle but too far away from me to enable and flying catch before it hit the ground.

Fortunately the failure mechanism I built in to protect the camcorder seems to have protected the
lens although it still took a hard hit. The glass disk and my prisms area different story. The disk hit
the front prism (0.5mm clearance) broke itself and chipped the prism.

That is terrible.
So now I know I'm not stupid to have used bolts, screws, wood and iron plates and built a pretty heavy thing.
I always wonder about epoxy glue. How well does it react in different circumstances and after a long time.

Epoxy glue would be fine. This was an edge tack with contact cement or PVC cement of a sliding joint (pipe cap on tube with a good 1/2" overlap) as I wanted to be able to dismantle and fine tune using a sharp knife to cut the glue or I could dissolve the PVC with boiling water.

Whatever, it went clutt!! then that shattering glass seemed to go on for a long long time as it rolled to a halt, fell over in its side and attracted the curious interest of bystanders, or maybe it was my reaction to the disaster which did that. It was a pity because that disk was a nice groundglass. I think I can turn the prism over and black paint the chip.