I'm going to start a new thread on this probably this weekend and post some pictures, but I figured with the topic and discussion within this thread I'd put up a post here cause some of this probably could be applied to extending the size of a dish.
I stayed home from work yesterday because the brakes on my car messed up and after I fixed the brakes, I decided to try out a idea of making a dish that I've been tossing around in my head.
I have a mount for a 76 cm dish here with no dish part, the dish part was bent almost in half when I got it, so I'd scrapped that and kept the mount and arm assembly. If it weren't for having the mount/arm assembly with no platter, I probably wouldn't have tried this! The mount looks identical to the one on my 76 cm Winegard except the LNB arm is oval instead of square, the part that actually bolts to the platter is identical, mounting holes,etc.
I took the platter from my 76 cm Winegard, laid it face up on a barrel and covered it with aluminum foil, sealed the edges of the foil with aluminum duct tape and then covered that with fiberglass cloth, stuck the four mounting bolts through it and put the nuts on the back side, then covered the whole deal with fiberglass resin. Once the fiberglass had hardened, I popped it off of the metal Winegard dish. The whole thing right now is butt ugly because I didn't sand it at all or bother sealing up the back side because I wanted to see if it'd work before I wasted anymore time/money on it.
Set my Winegard 76 cm on 95W and for CCTV I got a Q of 74% on the MicroHD. Swapped out the metal platter for the foil/fiberglass one that I'd made and I was surprised, got a Q of 75% and didn't have to adjust it at all.
Looking at the thing, I had doubts that it would work at all, like I said, it's real ugly looking right now, but I'm going to clean it up some, seeing as it did work!
It was kinda pricey and took about an hour working on it, it cost me $29 for the resin and $7 for the fiberglass cloth and I'm still not done, I still have to fiberglass the back and clean up the edges, so to actually do this instead of buying a dish wouldn't really be worth it, seeing as how you can buy a 76 cm for $40 something and $20 or so shipping. Was fun to do though and if something like cardboard or whatever could be fitted around a dish as a mold, maybe a dish could be extended in size this way.
