Old 8.25in LX10 Meade Scope (Tube Only, with dovetail)

Here is the story behind this telescope. It was found at the bottom of a lake after the lake level dropped. No telling how many years it sat down there. I picked it up off a friend and decided to restore it. You can see in the pictures it needed a lot of work, so I put hours and hours into the scope. I started by disassembling the entire scope, then sending the mirrors off to Paul at Spectrum Coatings, a leader in telescope optical coating. For around 150$ he recoated the primary and secondary mirrors with Enhanced Aluminum (EAL) R>95%1% (450-650nm). The reserve is set to 165.00. I am hoping to at least get what I put into this thing money wise, definatly wont get the time back ;) Unfortunately when this thing fell off the boat or wherever it came from, the corrector plate got cracked. NOW, contrary to what people might say, this is not that big of an issue. I had to remove what was left of the coatings on the corrector and repair the crack best I could. So, there are no high transmission coatings on the glass plate, so you get that pesky 4% reflectivity that glass naturally has. This is not that big of an issue either. The cracks on the corrector are no worse than the secondary mirror spider on a Newtonian design, and only result in diffraction spikes extruding off both sides of the brightest stars. For viewing fainter objects like galaxies, clusters, and nebulae, its not noticeable. There is definably a decrease in this scopes original performance, but it still works great given the circumstances. I'm only giving this thing up because I got lucky and came across an older LX3 10inch and don't have a use for this one anymore. I have used it many times and I am very very satisfied with how it turned out and think it would make an excellent purchase for anyone just getting into this, and looking for a good size aperture telescope. I attached an image I shot through the scope with my canon rebel XTi. You can see the optics work fine. This was a few long exposure images stacked, and my mount is set up with an auto guider. If you have any questions, please ask, and bid with confidence :)