Zakalwe

Dont shoot me, a mad idea perhaps. Depending on the thickness of the bonding material, how about trying a hot wire to slice the bond from the glass?

Or bend the tip of a fine pointed soldering iron to 90 degrees. You could then use this to melt the glue under the glass?

You lot are nuts!

This is a fascinating thread (though you collectively must have spent more than a couple of CCDs?)...keep it up. it's great seeing what a determined modder is capable of!

Here's another version:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/163Kg-Holding-Capacity-Action-Toggle/dp/B008NGSQHM/ref=pd_luc_sbs_01_01_t_lh?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Build a tracking mount for under £50 .....

http://www.liv.ac.uk/~sdb/Astro/K2/

Thanks for the update Malcolm, just read most of the thread and it looks like it's worth doing. I think I will go for the Austrian kit (about £120 delivered), I counted the teeth in the image and there looks to be 47 on the larger cog. I use EQMod via the handset so everything should remain the same.

You will have to modify the mount to make them fit.

I had my first pulleys done by a so called experienced amateur lathe freak of a friend of mine....he made a right mess of the small pulley, it was wobbling like a drunk who'd just had 10 pints. I ended up buying a mini lathe and doing my own, the mini lathe has started a whole new hobby

I am resisting the siren call of buying a mini lather and miller. I can see another money pit opening in the garage if I capitulate....

The market for belt drive conversion is really quite small, especially if you change the default SW ratio for a 4:1 or 5:1 ratio which requires EQMod to control the mount. I received around 6 requests for HEQ5 "kits" initially, and even on this batch process the machining costs were more expensive than the complete set of parts put together. There costs involved a setting up charge as each part had to be machined by hand on a mill / lathe - no CNC stuff, just old fashioned craftsmanship, and being a business were looking at making a small profit. The drawback with using a 3rd party to machine the parts was time - it took 4 weeks for them to fit my order in

The second batch was a lot simpler as Belting Online expanded their business to offer a machining service, so you ended up with the stock pulleys machined to specification delivered direct to the door in around 7-10 days, but the cost of the machining still doubled the cost of a stock part, still not cheap, but saved time. You then need to factor in the packaging, producing the instructions, and postage costs or in the original order, petrol costs for going to and from the machine shop. This all added up wasn't far off the cost of those commercial kits, and I wasn't doing the project for a profit.

I guess that all makes sense. After all, if you had to employ a professional machinist to make small volumes then it'd cost a far bit. And the market just isn't there to CNC up small batches profitably.

I've been chatting to Tommy at the shop in question. The mount needs a bit of fettling to work with their kit as well..holes opening up and so on.

Yes but producing the exact right length / wheel sizes and so on in a few numbers must be expensive.

Remember thos ones maintain the proper ratios on our mount and do not require to use eqmod.

The guy who designed this said it was complicated to implement and needed some special tools and mods on the mount itself. I wonder how it is done and wish there was a clear how-to on the internet somewhere... (he suggests doing it himself for a fee, but this would require sending the mount to hungaria...)

The parts would be bought in and modified. having said that, how much would a machinist charge to modify? £50 per hour?

Given that, I'd guess that €129 is there or thereabouts by the time you'd packaged them, invoiced them and made some profit.

That's an interesting find - it's just the price tag of €129 made me shudder slightly

That's interesting, though €120 for 4 pulleys and 2 belts is a bit "spendy", to say the least. There's about £15 of materials at the most in there.....

The guiding certainly would seem to be improved by this mod though in my case I wonder if the mount is the culprit in poorer PHD graphs. There's certainly backlash - I can move the mount a noticeable amount by hand in each axis but by deliberately using a slightly unbalanced setup I think this should be overcome. The noise doesn't bother me now I've got used to it and know it's normal. I guess I should record the PE and see if it's bad enough to warrant fiddling with the mount. I may get better guiding when I get to test my new (to me) MN190 with OAG as that would rule out any movement between main and guide scopes. It could be worse, of course, for other reasons. Anyway, mount mods won't be any time yet - too many other things to do.

Try tuning the wormwheels as per the Astro-Baby guide. My EQ6 was a bit "sloppy", especially on the DEC axis. I adjusted the worms and it has made a massive difference.

Glad you found it useful Olly.

I cringed at having to pay another 25% of the scope cost to go to a FT. Why don't they offer the scope with no focuser, and allow people to choose????

What's not good about the standard focuser, thinking about getting an l60 too- does it slip readily?

It's quite flimsy, especially for a £2K scope. When the focus lock is tightened it moves the draw-tube. i wouldn't like to try and hang a DSLR off of it....a webcam or planetary camera is OK though.

It can be improved...see here: http://polluxchung.com/gso_crayford_fix/index.html

I wish that they would offer an option not to buy any focuser with scopes. It might only knock £30-40 off the price, but even so, there's only so many crappy standard focusers that I have drawer room for!

That looks perfect - just what I've been looking for. Was it easy enough to fit?

It takes seconds. There's three tiny grubscrews holding the focuser on. Get a small Allan key, back those off and whip the old one out (hold on to it as it has a habit of falling out as soon as the second screw is touched). Easy peasy.

The standard focuser can be improved by tweaking the tension grubscres. Look under the standard focuser- theres a silver cross-head screw holding the focuser shaft in. Just behind that is a small black grubscrew. This sets the tension of the focuser shaft, which if tweaked, will improve the stifness of the focuser.

I recently bought my Lunt, but didn't want to stretch to the FeatherTouch focuser, which, to be honest, is probably overkill for what only ever carry the blocking filter and DMK camera.

I have found that the Baader Steeltrack 2" Newtonian focuser fits perfectly. The quality of this focuser is certainly up there with the Moonlite (I have a Moonlite on my Equinox refractor) and as it has the same machined dovetail as the Lunt/GSO item it fits without the need for an adapter).

The focuser is a little shorter than the standard one, you end up losing about 15 mm. However the BF has a very long tube, so getting focus wont be an issue.

This is the one that you want:

https://www.teleskop...de-Newtons.html

FLO attracted some justified criticism from me here, regarding the speed of updates on their helpdesk.

This is my latest experience.

I enquired about a DMK camera as it is showing out of stock on their website. I did this via the helpdesk and I received an answer in 16 minutes, confirming they had a small number left. I placed the order at 15:30 and the parcel arrived today at 2:45.

Now that's service

Thanks guys.

One thing that can help with Goto accuracy is to always approach the alignment star in the same direction. By this, I mean always using (for instance) the Right and Up arrow keys on the handset. If you overshoot, then back up beyond the alingmenrt star and then re-approach with Right and Up. Doing this will prevent the gearing backlash from putting the Goto system out.

Or get a Celestron. The Goto in that means that you don't need to select certain stars....just centre three brigh-tish stars and hit Align. If you have a GPS model it gets the Lat, Long and time from the GPS system, so setup is even easier.

And replied, thanks

Yes, I finished it, and the Ascom driver. It is available to buy.

Where from, please?

Yes, there is some confusion here. An OSC camera with the usual UV/IR blocker is producing the best 'luminance' of which it is capable. I think Zakalwe is mistaken, here. If you put a Luminance filter in front of an OSC camera you will get what you would get without it, an OSC image with an interpolated luminance layer.

Thanks Olly...you are, of course, correct. I was getting confused* with narrowband filters.

*It happens regularly.

What would you get if you put a luminance filter over the front of a OSC?

You could do that, but then only 1 in every 4 pixels are recording data (because of the Bayer matrix) which lowers the resolution

Having said that, at some point I am going to experiement with this. My CCD has a 6 megapixel APS sensor, so I still will have 1.4 megapixels recording data, albeit over a large area.

A big thumbs up for Bernard at Modern Astronomy. Superbly helpful on the phone, quick delivery and very reasonable costs.

Bought a few things this week from him (QHY5 camera, dew strips and controller, focuser upgrade for ED80 and some other bits and bobs), and each time he was keen to speak and advise.

Recommended

The missing item from my order turned up this morning. Spot on and thank you FLO

Well I for one am very satisfied. I haven't bought that much from them, and the wee glitch has been sorted professionally and swiftly (the test of any service is not how well it normally works, but how well mistakes and errors are rectified).

Top marks from me.

Ordered an EQ6 and a HitecAstro EQDIR adapter last weekend. Arranged delivery for today, as I was not at home during the week.

Two mahoosive parcels turned up at about 8:45 this morning. Can't fault that service.

The EQDIR isn't in the order, but I'll speak to FLO when they get a chance to answer the phones. It's no biggie as I am sure it is on it's way.

I've had lots of decent advice off them. Even when they have been flat out after XMas they have not made me feel rushed and have spent time talking through some options. I wish all retailers were like this.