I'll check it out. It sure got my attention. Now that it's daylight Ican get a
better idea of what happened..

Yes, I removed the gear. I had moved the scope to M51 before but perhaps not
that late in the evening. After reassembly I ran the RA drive through about 200
degrees in each direction. Thanks for the tips.

Doug Groesbeck wrote:

> Wayne,
>
> > Tonight I was moving from Altair to M51 with a GOTO, when about 2/3 of
> > the way to M51 the RA started to shudder and then sort of backed up
> > and stopped.
> <snip>
> > About two weeks ago, I took the RA section completely apart to clean
> > the worm wheel and gear. My suspicions are that one of the two hex
> > bolts loosened or that my grease job was in adequate. Any comments?
>
> Did you remove the gear when you cleaned it, or did you leave in situ? If
> you removed the gear, I might suspect that it could now be slightly
> off-center and the RA assembly is binding up when you get to the "high
> side". If you left the gear in place, my other hunch would be that the RA
> drive assembly isn't properly aligned to the gear. When I removed my RA
> drive for cleaning, I put the drive back in and left it slightly loose then
> ran the RA fully around in both directions several times to let the drive
> assembly find a "neutral" spot before tightening it fully.
>
> I'd suggest checking into either of those possibilities, then running the
> scope in Land mode and rotating it fully in RA to see if the binding happens
> again. As a precaution, run it in Find speed or turn the slew rate down
> while doing this.
>
> -Doug

--
Wayne T. Watson (121.015 Deg. W, 39.262 Deg. N, 2,701 feet)

"Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins.
Which of the two has the grander view?" -- Victor Hugo

Web Page: http://home.earthlink.net/~mtnviews
Imaginarium Museum:
http://home.earthlink.net/~mtnviews/imaginarium.html

View index by [date] [author] [subject]
Previous message: [M]: OT:Astronomy mailing list., Bud Raridon
Next message: [M]: 416XT Autoguider, Bostjan
Next message in thread: Re: [M]: RA Shudder & Stop, Wayne Watson
Previous message in thread: Re: [M]: RA Shudder & Stop, Doug Groesbeck