Tariq

Thanks for reply Peter, it's definitely something mechanical going on, it's not been operating properly for a few months indoors or out. I have just taken the drive motor off to try and turn the gear that drives the worm screw by hand and it's smooth when i turn the gear so far up to about 10 or 20 degrees then it starts to get harder and harder to turn until i it won't turn anymore something just seems to be slowing it down to a grinding halt. 20231206_193144.mp4

Hi All, wondering if anyone can help. i bough a used Skywatcher EQ 3 EQ star motors on it about 12 months ago and was working really well up until a few months ago, I'm not sure whats happened but it just seems temperamental, sometimes the motors won't move the mount from the parked position, sometimes it will rotate so far and then start to slow down and jam up. I'm not quite sure what would suddenly cause this but after doing some reading up I feel like it is something to do with work drive/worm gear and worm screw in the RA axis. The mount has completely lost tracking too but that would make sense if the RA is not moving. I know there is a way to change the gap between the gears but not 100% sure what to do. Any ideas what could be going on? This is really my first EQ mount so I'm not technically gifted when it comes to these mounts, how to manipulate the hex screws to adjust things. Thanks Tariq

Hi All, Is there anyone familiar with EQ Star driven mount? This the upgrade that my Skywatcher EQ3 mount came with when I bought it second hand. It worked like a dream for months and months until something seem to have happened. I think my 2 year old child may have managed to get to my mount and starting pulling at wires, but he could only reach the EQ Star motor drive controller pulling at the RH45 cables and not the motors themselves. So since then I have reseated the RJ45 cables. I went out a few nights ago and I noticed the motor on one of the axes I think the DEC axes seemed to make a noisy sound and the telescope didn't seem to be moving on that axis, I was horrified and just brought my telescope in and called it a night. the day after I decided to plug it in again messing about changing the RJ45 cables and connected the mount to computer to give it another try and then it seemed to be running smoothly on both axes telescope seemed to move fine on the RA and DEC so I thought the issue was fixed. That night on a clear sky i went out PA aligned to pole star and went ahead with the PA wizard on my software. when it took the first image of the Pole star all the stars seemed sharp but as soon as it rotated the mount and took the next image for plate solve the stars really trailed, I tried this a few times with the same result, I then just slewed to a random part of the sky to take a picture and saw some extreme star trailing. I don't know whats happened or why my mount is no longer tracking! I seemed to remember it doing this once before when I was out using my telescope but noticed one of the RJ45 cables was unplugged and plugging it back in solved the issue but I have checked the cables and they are in properly, the only other thing I can think of is incompatible RJ45 cables as I just found some random ones around the house but is incompatibility possible with cables? The 2 images at the top show a picture of the NCP before the PA sequence and then the bottom ones are an image taken after 1 mount rotation. Any help would be much appreciated