Skywatcher Skyliner 250PX - Smoothing the motions ....

[John]

I've just taken delivery of a pre-owned Skyliner 250PX - and very nice it looks too

Pity about the

The altitude motions seem quite smooth but the azimuth motion seems a bit "sticky". Does anyone have any tips on how to make the motions of these scopes smoother ?.

Any other tips and wrinkles for Skyliner scopes also gratefully received

Thanks,

John

[Whippy]

Right-angled finder would make life a lot easier. I should have got one with mine....

Tony..

[SteelRat]

Phil (ol' Geppetto) was an expert in these matters I reckon John. Am sure he did something with teflon but here's a mod he made to his homebuilt 12", the StarGAZer12 8) Read the bit at the bottom.

Edit: There may be more subtle fixes. Drop him a line if no-one else comes up with anything.

[MartinB]

Right-angled finder would make life a lot easier. I should have got one with mine....

May be it's just me but I could never get on with a right angled finder, I find I need to have one eye on the finder and the other on the sky esp when initially homing in. Others swear by them.

[Whippy]

I think you may be right there Martin. I just found when I had my Skyliner that using the finder when it could be not even 3 feet from the floor could be a complete pain whereas with a RA finder, you could just look down into it rather than contorting yourself into awful positions just to get your bearings. Horses for courses I s'pose but I felt I really should got one when I had mine.

Tony..

[FLO]

The altitude motions seem quite smooth but the azimuth motion seems a bit "sticky". Does anyone have any tips on how to make the motions of these scopes smoother ?.

A popular method of improving the Azimuth bearing 'stiction' is to place plastic washers around the centre bolt, in-between the two boards. It is better to use several thin washers rather than one thick one so that you can fine-tune the effect. The washers can be cut from the large plastic milk containers, the type found in Supermarkets, or similar. They work by taking some of the weight off the Teflon pads and placing it in the centre, at the pivot point. You aren't looking to transfer all the weight, just enough to hit that magic point where the bearing moves freely but has enough resistance to stop where required. Experiment with the number of washers until you hit that point. Another popular modification is to replace the Teflon pads with larger pads. Some even fit furniture sliders or similar. Check also that the centre bolts lock nut is effective. I once had a Dobsonian where it kept loosening. It drove me nuts until I found a replacement.

HTH

[John]

Thanks folks and Steve especially - I think I'll try the milk bottle washer trick !.

John

[FLO]

Right-angled finder would make life a lot easier. I should have got one with mine....

May be it's just me but I could never get on with a right angled finder, I find I need to have one eye on the finder and the other on the sky esp when initially homing in. Others swear by them.

It depends on your eyesight. If you can focus on infinity unaided then a straight-through finder is great for the both-eyes-open method where you see both the magnified sky and the regular sky simultaneously. If you can do it, and not everyone can, then it is a cinch to centre something using this method. Otherwise an angled erect-image finder is more convenient. My gripe with optical finders in general is that they don't make straight-through erect-image finder-scopes.

All finder-scopes should be erect-image. Perhaps we should start a campaign

[themos]

Does anyone else do this ridiculous one-eyed head-dance when leaning over to see through a finder where your brain goes into a hysteresis loop, opening and closing the wrong eye and moving the head to always place the closed eye at the finder eyepiece? Or am I just showing my age?

[FLO]

Try not closing one eye, your brain soon learns to prioritise :cyclopsani:

[themos]

A younger brain, perhaps!

[Vega]

Both eyes open method works a treat for me.

Vega

[Locko]

Thats a good tip about those plastic washers as i have the same ploblem with stickyness,

will try experimenting this weekend,