Converting spotting scopes to binoculars

Has anyone here given much thought to constructing a pair of binoculars from
a pair of spotting scopes? Any links to successful or unsuccessful
projects?

I was looking at the Pentax 80mm ED spotting scope. This one was designed to
accept standard 1 1/4 eyepieces and got rave reviews on the Better View
Desired site. The ED glass gives it superb color correction.

The advantage of using spotting scopes over telescopes is that the correct
image prism system is already in place. For me, one of the main benefits of
binoculars is that you get a correctly oriented image. Bino-scopes generally
give a L-R reversed image and this would put me off.

Mounting spotting scopes side by side there would be a problem with getting
the interpupillary distance small enough. However, the Pentax spotters (as do
many others) have the eyepiece "raised" above the objective axis by the
correcting prism. So if you were to rotate the left tube clockwise and the
right tube counter clockwise, you could narrow the IPD to the degree desired.


With the Pentax I mentioned above, I've since learned that it even has a
rotating tripod adapter that allows you to rotate the scope along its optical
axis while mounted. This would allow me to angle in the eyepieces for
adjusting IPD. The only catch is whether the rotating tripod adapter is
precise enough for the system to maintain collimation when being rotated.

Collimation of the tubes could be accomplished by placing a reticle eyepiece
in each tube sequentially and aligning it similar to a finder tube.

Does this sound like a feasible idea. The Pentax ED spotter goes for around
$750 so you could get some killer binoculars for around $2000 including
eyepieces.

The Pentax 80ED has a 504mm Fl. This means with a 24 Panoptic I would get 21x
with a 3.24 degree FOV. That would be really sweet.