Problem with Motors - CG5 Goto mount - HELP!!

Seconded! it would make for a good laugh. :lol:

Sounds like a good idea! Make an official request in the Suggestions forum!

Keith it looks like we had a similar weekend of mount woes!!!!

In my case I was giving a friend a crash course in autoguiding on friday night when I heard this strange noise coming from my mount. A clinking sound repeated every few seconds. Being late and tired I decided to shut down and deal with it in the morning. I had been planning to strip down the mount to the barest components anyway as from all reports the grease in the CG5 is awful tack. Anyway next morning I discovered the cause of the clunking sound. The counterweight bar had come loose and was making the noise :oops:

ANyway I decided to proceed with the mount stripdown anyway. It took me all of saturday to completely dissassemble both axes, clean the nasty glue that the manufacturer loosley terms 'lubricant' off all the metal surfaces. I polished all the bearing surfaces with a very fine 8000 grade abrasive cloth and regreased everything with a much better lithium based grease.

After reassembling the mount the results are dramatic. Both axes move amazingly freely so much so that they are now incredibly sensitive to being off balance. (before I could move the counterweights over 2 inches in either direction before in started to tip over). Now moving the weights a couple of mm causes inbalance. I noticed last night that I still need to do a little work on the gear meshing on the dec axis, but apart from that It moves very sweetly now!!


I didnt get to document it all since there was so much nasty black grease around I didnt want to be handling my camera.

Keith/Trevor you might find this interesting. I used this as a guide for disassembling the mount.

www.astronomyboy.com/cg5/

Thanks Dave, What grease did you use? Where did you buy it? How much?

It seems the cg5 is probably a little too mass produced all the same, great for visual stuf, but photography is dissapointing when it goes outta whack easily.

Keith..

Thanks Dave, What grease did you use? Where did you buy it? How much?

It seems the cg5 is probably a little too mass produced all the same, great for visual stuf, but photography is dissapointing when it goes outta whack easily.

Keith..

Keith,

I used 3in1(brand) White Lithium Grease. It comes in a spray tin and it cost €6.99 in Halfolds on the Malahide Road. You should be able to get it any major motor factors. Good quality copper grease would work well too.

One thing I discovered last night was a periodic error in declination which wasnt there before. I'm pretty sure its down to a bit of grime getting on the dec motor gearing. I'll clean that later and I'm pretty sure that will solve that.

One thing which is interesting is that before the fix, I had to make a 700ms backlash correction for declination in guidedog. Last night I found that I could get away with no such correction. The dec was responding pretty much instantly.