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Ogem mount - still vapour-ware or have they started shipping


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1 hour ago, Zakalwe said:

Nope, and neither am I interested in seeing them. What I want is when I spend £5K on a product is support. Not a shirty email because someone's ego has been wounded. Nor do I want to spend months trawling the Internet trying to get fixes.

My experience has massively dented my interest in this hobby.

Would you mind posting a link to the thread/s? Im curious as I just bought a mesu and find all information interesting good and bad.  I didn’t come across any threads highlighting significant issues prior to purchase.

Thanks 

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From the outside looking in I've never heard a bad report of a mesu, I see a u tube video of a guy that did have a issue with his and it come to light that it was a issue with a batch of servo motors or something that was completely out of Lucas hands but instead of saying nothing to do with me, he traced all the known mounts that potentionally had the same issue and personally replaced them all .. now if that's not customer service I don't know what is... 

Edited by newbie alert
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I believe in that instance Lucs form mesu actually travelled to all of the different customers in person all around Europe to fix the issue.  That is going above and beyond in my mind and i would say that was amazing service. But there's always 2 sides to every story - so maybe there might be a mix of good & bad service.

 

 

Edited by Northernlight
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As a cynic, I would say it would have been cheaper and saver to travel to the customer, given that his mounts don’t come packaged, and the risk of mount damage in transit would have been too great.  But it’s really good service none the less.  

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Mesu aside - i'm interested in the new Gemini E.Fric mount. Looks like it's built like a tank and shipped to the uk with controllers for 3900 euro seems like a good price.  Apparently shipping will be Mid / end of june.

I think their Gemini G35F was fairly well received.

Just not sure about the lack of encoder - buy given that i always plate solve, as long as the tracking and pointing is good then Encoders shouldn't matter.   Anyone want to buy an EQ8 around mid june lol

Edited by Northernlight
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1 hour ago, tooth_dr said:

As a cynic, I would say it would have been cheaper and saver to travel to the customer, given that his mounts don’t come packaged, and the risk of mount damage in transit would have been too great.  But it’s really good service none the less.  

Lucas travelled to every customer and personally installed the motors or whatever that was found to be faulty

Here's the video, goto -36 mins in for the relevant info

 

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5 hours ago, steppenwolf said:

You clearly haven't seen his premises then!

I have.  I went there when I accidentally broke a motor on my mount, and it is pretty impressive!  Lucas was superb and replaced the motor for me while I waited, FOC, just charging for the actual motor.

Top bloke, impressive workshop and I am one of the ones who has had no issues at all, so extremely happy with it.

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43 minutes ago, newbie alert said:

Lucas travelled to every customer and personally installed the motors or whatever that was found to be faulty

Here's the video, goto -36 mins in for the relevant info

Thanks, good video.  I don’t know the situation but i was surmising that this was the only option.  Mesu Mounts aren’t packaged, so postage back to Holland would have been harder than flying out. 

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I have a serious grievance with my Mesu - and it has not been resolved.

It is the most boring mount I have ever owned. I switch it on and it guides at ~0.4" total RMS all night long - every night.

I am going to have to find something else to adjust backlash on and convert to belt drive and mess bout adjusting and greasing with snake oil etc to occupy my time.

There is no fun in this - it's really not good enough 😉 

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1 hour ago, Skipper Billy said:

I have a serious grievance with my Mesu - and it has not been resolved.

It is the most boring mount I have ever owned. I switch it on and it guides at ~0.4" total RMS all night long - every night.

I am going to have to find something else to adjust backlash on and convert to belt drive and mess bout adjusting and greasing with snake oil etc to occupy my time.

There is no fun in this - it's really not good enough 😉 

We could swap mounts for say a few years

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31 minutes ago, Erling G-P said:

How are they delivered in the first place then? - just curious.

Modern Astronomy are the sole UK importers & are collected in batches from Lucas by them, you have the choice of collection from Modern Astronomy or delivery in person by Bernard. 

Edited by whipdry
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6 hours ago, Erling G-P said:

How are they delivered in the first place then? - just curious.

Whipdry is 100% right. Getting mine to Northern Ireland from London was difficult enough.  Luckily I was able to get friends to collect in person and drive home in the boot of their car wrapped in a few blankets.   Way off topic though 😎 I’ve spoke to Lucas twice since buying it and he’s been more than courteous. 

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15 hours ago, Skipper Billy said:

I have a serious grievance with my Mesu - and it has not been resolved.

It is the most boring mount I have ever owned. I switch it on and it guides at ~0.4" total RMS all night long - every night.

I am going to have to find something else to adjust backlash on and convert to belt drive and mess bout adjusting and greasing with snake oil etc to occupy my time.

There is no fun in this - it's really not good enough 😉 

That's just not cricket - if you haven't got any backlash to fight with then it can't possibly be a real mount - It's terrible, you might even have to resort to talking the her indoors instead of tinkering in the obs / shed 🤣

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9 minutes ago, Northernlight said:

you might even have to resort to talking the her indoors instead of tinkering in the obs / shed 🤣

Steady on!  A chap can take things too far, you know?

James

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20 hours ago, tooth_dr said:

Would you mind posting a link to the thread/s? Im curious as I just bought a mesu and find all information interesting good and bad.  I didn’t come across any threads highlighting significant issues prior to purchase.

Thanks 

Its on here, but I'm not interested in mud-slinging. I will call it as I see it though.

I'm delighted that my problem has been solved as I believe that I was probably the first to experience the problem. I know of at least four other people that had the same problem, some of whom were invaluable in diagnosing and testing possible solutions. I also know of at another few people that have other problems that took a while to resolve (one took many months where the individual was without their mount).

Any man-made object can and will have problems. That's just a fact of life. I was unfortunate to experience a very difficult-to-resolve problem which was not unique to me. Given the work that was done by the makers of SiTech (kudos to Dan Gray, he was absolutely brilliant). Lucas Mesu took extreme exception to me posting my experience on here and his approach went from sporadic attempts to offer advice to "send it back and you'll get your money back". My counter offer was sure- arrange collection or pay for delivery from Lancashire to London after which there was no contact. Bern at MA was better, but had no resolution.

It's easy to swing when you are winning. The real measure is how you respond when things are not working. In this regard the Mesu experience was appalling.

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I suppose in any industry you will always get a mix of positive & negative feedback  - For me i had been waiting on the Ogem/Trident but the extended delays put me off. I'm now in the process of saving the extra cash to buy a Mesu based purely on the positive reports that i have read about for both mount build quality & performance coupled with what appears to be very good customer service on the most part.

The customer service aspect is what has really swung my decision to save the extra cash towards the mesu

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Notwithstanding,  issues with specific  mounts, it might be worth pondering on the fact that to point at a star and track it with or without guiding reliably is a very complex task.

Whatever the design it requires precision engineering, robust and complex firmware and electromechanical components and often similarly complex computer software.

Many issues reported here and elsewhere are due to the interface between these components especially when they are from different manufacturers/suppliers.

Unfortunately,  it is often the case that end users are stuck in the middle trying to diagnose the problem.

Two examples,  one when I was  telecomms manager and my team were being slated for a network being unreliable.  It turned out the two Vax computer at either end had incompatible time outs. The second where I could  not get The Sky 6 to correctly set the time on a AP controller on a Parallax mount. I got a detailed lesson from the AP firmware specialist on how to calculate local hour angle from sidereal time etc. Eventually,  I found an error in his code that did the sums wrong if you happened to be in the zero time zone. This had not been fixed some years later when I had an AP900 for a while.

My advice, for what it is worth, is to minimise the number of components as much as possible.

Regards Andrew 

Edited by andrew s
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5 minutes ago, andrew s said:

My advice, for what it is worth is to minimise the number of components as much as possible.

Regards Andrew 

Dob it is, then 😉

Edited by RayD
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15 hours ago, whipdry said:

Modern Astronomy are the sole UK importers & are collected in batches from Lucas by them, you have the choice of collection from Modern Astronomy or delivery in person by Bernard. 

While I don't know how MA handles this, I do know that my mount came in a sturdy wood crate. That did not prevent the dec motor encoder to have problems from the shipping.

3 hours ago, Zakalwe said:

Its on here, but I'm not interested in mud-slinging. I will call it as I see it though.

I'm delighted that my problem has been solved as I believe that I was probably the first to experience the problem. I know of at least four other people that had the same problem, some of whom were invaluable in diagnosing and testing possible solutions. I also know of at another few people that have other problems that took a while to resolve (one took many months where the individual was without their mount).

Any man-made object can and will have problems. That's just a fact of life. I was unfortunate to experience a very difficult-to-resolve problem which was not unique to me. Given the work that was done by the makers of SiTech (kudos to Dan Gray, he was absolutely brilliant). Lucas Mesu took extreme exception to me posting my experience on here and his approach went from sporadic attempts to offer advice to "send it back and you'll get your money back". My counter offer was sure- arrange collection or pay for delivery from Lancashire to London after which there was no contact. Bern at MA was better, but had no resolution.

It's easy to swing when you are winning. The real measure is how you respond when things are not working. In this regard the Mesu experience was appalling.

The mount is absolutely brilliant when it's working properly, but for me it took the best part of an year to arrive at that stage.

While I have no way of knowing how your interaction with Lucas and MA has been, I can say that I had 2 incidents with the mount requiring repairs - one when the mount arrived and the dec motor encoder was faulty and one when the mount fall due to high wind and required some DEC plates to be replaced - and Lucas has been responsive and helpful. I have a thread of more than 150 emails exchanged between me and Lucas and the vast majority of times he responded within 24 hours. Sometimes I was a bit in doubt that the mount will ever be fully functional but now I am a happy duck guiding at lower than 0.4 arcsec @ 1680mm.

 


 

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I have some more news from USA dealers regarding - JTW:  to be shipped/ sold as of June - this year!! -26bit encoders.

E. Fric - ready to order now - 6-8 weeks from now -  30kg for AP. without - ENCODERS - the idea is there, wait and see.

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Gorr_77,

I spoke to manufacturer directly about the E.Fric mount and the 30kg limit and there are some caveats to that 30kg.

for Imaging I was told that the 30kg limit was for Pier mounted "Compact" scope - but for other configurations such a big Newts then the Max imaging payload would be 24-25kg.  Not entirely sure what constitutes as a compact scope, maybe RC's / SCT's etc.

Rich

Edited by Northernlight
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