Carbon Brush

If you choose to carry a big heavy lead acid battery (the cheapest solution) then the type is relatively unimportant. In an evening of running a mount you are not going to eat into much of the capacity. So if you have a grotty old battery that won't start the car on a cold morning, or won't hold up the headlights beyond half an hour, it is probably good enough to run a mount. This statement assumes a battery with a general loss of performance through age and sulphate. If an individual cell has failed, that is a different story. If weight is of interest, or you are going to have to pay full price for a battery, then you are far better spending on something with a lithium battery. Excellent life expectancy. Superb cold performance. Inbuilt charge and discharge monitors prevent you from doing harm to the battery. If you want to run a mount, and lots of dew heaters, and a camera, and other things, then you ought to get the calculator out to ensure a small capacity lithium package is going to be good enough. Just my take on battery power - not necessarily everyone agrees! Hope this helps, David.

At work, over years of shipping and using various carriers we came to a conclusion. Carrier insurance is not worth the paper it is printed on. I have had arguments with TNT in particular who considered anything secondhand to be worth its scrap weight value only! For work, we have shipping insurance as part of the general company insurance. Never using the carrier insurance. For home use, I take the risk of breakage. When sending for work or home, packing materials and thickness always assume the item will be dropped a metre onto a concrete floor. Which it sometimes is. When receiving parcels at work, we always photograph (before opening) anything that looks abused and insist on marking the carriers document to this effect. The attached pics show two packages recently delivered to work by UKMail, now part of DHL. Draw your own conclusions about carrier care.

I am part way through fettling a Skywatcher 10" dob. When supplied, it had the basic handset and has at some point been upgraded to a GOTO handset. The original handset bracket is of course too small for the new handset and a bracket does not seem to be readily available. OK I could have used a bit of velcro. But I thought a 3D printed bracket might do the job better. The attached photos show the prototype bracket. The screw holes match those already on the mount and the handset just drops in. I suppose I should make the finished item in black or white to match the mount. The OBJ file can be opened using windows 3D viewer, or similar to get an all around look. A rainy afternoon spent doodling on the computer. David. Handset Holder-4.obj

This sounds great. Many thanks FLO. Looking forward to giving it a try out.