Broken Telescope Tripod

When I brought my telescope and mount outside the other day to do some solar observing, a leg bracket broke on my tripod as I was opening up the tripod legs.  This bracket holds the leg in place when it is in use and the tripod is useless with a broken bracket.  My day wasn't starting out too well.

I wanted to use this particular telescope mount because it has slow motion control knobs.  These slow motion controls make it easier to keep the sun in the center of my view.  As I slowly turn one knob, the sun stays in the center of my view.  Now I had to move the telescope over to another small mount.  I went back to my new-ish Alt-Az manual mount.  I really wanted to use those slow motion controls for this session though so this was a bit of a letdown.  Having another thing break and added to my to-do list was an even bigger letdown.  

As you can see in the photo, the tabs that hold the spreader bar snapped off.  I had fairly recently rebuilt this mount with ball bearings and a better saddle so it works very well now.  Well, it worked very well before this bracket broke!  

Now I needed to decide which direction to go with this mount.  Do I try to find another new tripod altogether?  Do I try to build my own part somehow to replace this broken bracket?  Or, do I simply upgrade to a better manual equatorial mount and toss this one in the trash?  

After all the work I have done in upgrading this mount, I really did not want to toss it in the trash.  I am not ready for that.  I decided to search online for a solution to my problem.  

After about an hour or two of searching for different options, I stumbled across a guy in England who sells new brackets.  This was a big surprise because I didn't think these brackets would be available for this old manual mount.  I ordered three of them this morning and breathed a sigh of relief knowing that this is a fairly simple solution to this problem.  It would require some drilling, cutting, and riveting but it is a fairly simple solution producing very little waste.  I decided to order three of them because I got to thinking that the other two might be well on their way to cracking and breaking off soon.  While I'm fixing the one leg, I might as well do some preventive maintenance on the other two legs as well so I'll replace all three brackets.  

The downside is the cost.  Three new brackets cost almost as much as purchasing a new replacement tripod.  Regardless, the cost of the brackets was less than a new tripod so that was the route to go.  Also, I wouldn't be tossing out almost an entire tripod simply due to one broken bracket.  

Once the brackets arrive, I'll reassemble this old little mount and put it back in service.