Thinking of moving to direct drive motors

[skybadger]

Hi all

Im looking for advice on the idea of improving my mount by taking off the worm/dc servo and moving to a direct drive motor with built in encoders. 

The reason for this is that I get quite  a large periodic error on the existing worm & wheel and have some options to address this. My kit consists of a 8 or 12" scope with 6" frac twin mounted and a pair of guidescopes, cameras, sun scope etc depending on season. So I'd like to be tracking well at 2m focal length and upwards of 30Kg payload.

My thoughts on options are:

• Buy a new mount - rather expensive, even if second hand. Maybe £3.5K for a second hand Mesu 200 ?
• Replace the worm and wheel on the existing AE mount. Certainly do-able. Beacon Hill do a 11" worm for about £400. Are there any recommended suppliers for large worm/wheel sets? It coudn't exceed 11" diameter.
• Replace the entire worm and wheel for a direct drive motor attached to the bottom end of the RA shaft. This would also require a dedicated motor controller/driver and then an ASCOM driver. I have one of these I did for the SkySensor so the ASCOM part isn't that hard. This is probably the most expensive option but still less than £3.5K . Has anyone ht any experience of buying and fitting these direct drive motors in retrofit and what were the results ?
• An other option to be identified.

What are your thoughts - is too long and painful to fit your own DD motor to a mount that its much more worthwhile to buy or should I perservere and sppend more time looking at the worm /upgrade the worm first for relatively small beans ?

Cheers

Mike