richardejm

I have had my mesu for a while but only recently realised that there was a much better way of adjusting polar alignment than the knurled knobs. These are quite hard to move, especially the one for altitude. The solution , probably obvious to everyone here, was to replace the knobs with m8 nuts and washers. These can then be moved easily and more accurately with a spanner. I kept the existing knobs as lock nuts.

A cautionary tale for all mesu mk1 owners out there: don't be tempted to open this "inspection panel" : I did this in a moment of "I wonder what's in there?" and found the motor spindle as expected. I then later experienced lots of slippage in RA and noticed that the axis was much easier to move than before. I emailed Mr Mesu who asked me to measure the torque. I didn't have a spring balance so I improvised with this highly sophisticated measuring device from Sainsbury's: and found it was about 3Nm - much too low should be 11. He kindly did a skype session to fix this and I explained what I had done. He told me that the panel is actually a finely calibrated roller tension adjuster and shouldn't be touched - do'h! The rotation angle of the panel sets the tension by adjusting the position of the motor spindle. There is a fine line inscribed on it that points to another marker on the motor housing when it's in the right place. I , of course, had put it back in a random position which turned out to be too loose. I had bought a spring balance by this time and it now with Lucas's kind help it all works correctly again.

Sitech config is only used to configure the firmware in the controller. You need the ascom driver from here http://siderealtechnology.com/SiTechSetup095G.exe Sgp, apt, nine, phd2 etc connect to this driver to control the mount. Good luck!