Cem60 help please

[northantsnick]

Received my new Cem60, trier pier and i-polar this week.

Initially I was a little disappointed to see that although the retailers site suggested that if I bought the mount and the i-polar together they would install it prior to delivery, it never happened and I received a small box containing the i-polar for me to fit. 

Well after plenty of reading and some deep breaths I managed it over some 2 hours of trying to decipher IKEA like instructions. 

1st light with the mount was tonight and I read the manual at least 3 times and set everything up by the book, making sure to double check what I had done. 

Started i-polar and managed to get the cross hairs centered on the maroon spot. Set a zero point on the mount in the polarise position and began a 2 star alignment. 

I just wanted to make sure all was working well, so no astronomy tonight, just a field test. 

All the slews resulted in at least 15 degrees out, not even in the finder scope. 

Started again, same result. 

5 times I went through the process over 2 hours and each time during alignment, the mount moved the scope to nowhere near the target. 

I'm a very frustrated old man. A few times the mount was slewing to target nice and quietly then suddenly started whining and grinding. I noticed that when I was locking up the saddle to engage the gear there is a point half way through where the plastic knob starts to tighten but it's nowhere near the end position and when it's backed off again it seems to click and then I can fully close it before backing off slightly to slew--- almost like its not engaging in the correct position. 

Can anybody help, as I'm not happy after spending this sort of money to effectively not be able to use it

Many thanks

Nick 

[Stuart1971]

It sounds like you had the clutch either too tight or not tight enough, the way I understand with the clutches on these mounts is that you turn the black clutch knob to tighten, then when just snug, back it off a small amount, the magnetic gear will keep it in place and prevent any backlash, the grinding you heard sounds like it was probably too tight...if used correctly the clutch system on these mounts is very good... HTH 😀 don’t give up....

[michael8554]

If I understand the i-Polar spec, this is an aid to getting good Polar Alignment ?

Good PA minimises Dec drift and Field Rotation when you're guiding,

But accurate moves to a target are the result of a good Star Alignment .

If you have the date, time, GMT/BST, location data wrong then the scope will not slew close to the Alignment stars.

Each brand of scope has it's own method of entering these, very easy to get wrong.

Michael