Advice on equipment maintenance

[Andy38416]

Morning all,

I'm after some advice on maintaining equipment after a long break without being used. The situation I'm in is I have a goto telescope (nexstar 127) which hasn't been used for maybe around a year (a complete shame, mainly because I have a street lamp right outside my back garden lighting my garden up).

Though I am looking to get back in this hobby but wondered if there is anything I should be doing maintenance wise before I start, I'm not really thinking the telescope itself as this has been covered to protect from dust etc, I was just thinking the gears / motors of the goto? Wondered if anyone had every done some similar just to keep everything moving freely?

Thanks

[Putaendo Patrick]

Hi Andy, Years ago I studied at UEA and visited the Ten Bells Pub, or was it the otherway round?

My only advice for any electrical device is just make sure to remove the batteries.

[cjdawson]

I hope you removed the batteries when you stored the scope - that's something that I do as a matter of course with my kit.  (I do that by trying not to use internal batteries at all when possible.)

As for getting your kit ready.  I'd start off by check out that the battery is healthy.  That's easily done by charging it overnight, and letting it get fully topped up.  Once done, it should stay at the correct voltage.  i.e. for a leisure battery, they'll get to about 14v when charging, then will quickly drop to around 13volts when taken off charge.  After that, they'll stabilise and stay at the same voltage for a while.  You can get specialist battery testers, but this quick and dirty methods will do most of the time.  The only other test that's left is to use the battery and see if it's still up to the job.  Chances are that it will be fine.

As for the rest of the electrics, if they've been kept in dry conditions, the chances are everything will be fine and there's no need to do anything special.  I'd hook everything up, power up and see if it all still working.  Might be worth recalibrating the motor drives if you can as a year sat still might stiffen up the gearing a bit - having said that, with good grease of the gears and everything being clean and well maintained, it should be perfectly fine.

It'll also be worth checking the collimation of your scope.  This shouldn't be too hard a process - a star test will be enough to see if that's still on or needs adjusting.

You might also want to have a check for updated firmware for your goto controller.  There might have been updates that are worth putting on, then again, there might not.  But it's worth a check, you never know ;-)

[Andy38416]

Thanks for both replies. I left the battery's out, I always do after each session and it has been stored in a spare bedroom completely covered by a plastic sheet and hasn't been knocked in anyway.

I will fire it up later so will test all the motors, just didn't know if I needed to grease them up before I used it.

Thanks again for your help.