found broken ring

Lovely day.

Clear Sky Chart for Fingal was reporting average transparency and seeing this evening.

"Well, let's do it." And then I thought about getting the telescope outside to beginning cooling.

At first, I was just going to grab the little OTA, the Maksutov-Cassegrain that I had used on Wednesday evening.

Hmm. I reconsidered.

Why not "The Big Gun?" The Schmidt-Cassegrain.

Yeah. All right. Big aperture for Mars!

Headed to the "Astronomy Closet" and carefully hauled down the covered 8-inch telescope tube.

Heard a clink as I walked to the deck.

Occurred to me that I had not inspected the Celestron 'scope since the move. The move before by the horrible movers. There wasn't the sound of a shattered objective or fractured mirror and glass dust sliding around. Thank the Universe.

Set it gently down in the shaded part of the balcony.

Back inside... misc. other errands.

Then I thought I should open the Orion bag to improve breathing, speed the cool-down.

Set back! 

Oh no.

The rearward ring clamp was broken! The old white metal had split.

Damn it.

Immediately, I thought "They did break it!" Despite the "FRAGILE" labelling. Rotten moving company. 

But maybe not. This could be a stress fracture...

Now what am I going to do?

Immediately, I thought: well, now I can finally switch to a rail. But that's not trivial. And the Vixen mount would require an adapter...

So then, a replace ring is the simplest thing to do. But where in hell will I found one of these?

Is metal repair an option? It looks like what Poppa called "white metal" which I remember was difficult to work with.

Can I hack something? At least for the evening? Something to secure hold the 8" SCT?

Damn.