Heq5 pro fitting new bearings

[rainbow demon]

hi all

may sound like a stupid question but, recently fitted the Rowen belt mod kit from FLO, and have also decided to strip down the mount and fit new bearings, so my question is  to anyone who has done the same, do the new bearings come pre greased and if so suitable for the mount , if so should I degrease  them and reapply lithium grease ??

thankyou in anticipation

clear skies. 

[Cosmic Geoff]

Why do you want to fit new bearings? I am not familiar with bearing swaps on these mounts, but there can only be two reasons for changing the bearings:

1) the originals are worn out

2) to fit a better performing bearing

I doubt 1) very much, since my car engine does not appear worn out after 160,000 miles/ tens of millions of revs, so it seems unlikely that your mount has worn out after a few hundred revs.

2) Depends if the bearing you source is identical to the Chinese original, - they seem very fond of a thick gluey grease, or from a European aftermarket maker, in which case ask them about the grease.

[Padraic M]

@rainbow demon I fit new SKG bearings to my HEQ5 mount. The new bearings aren't pre-greased (or not much anyway) so you can apply a light coat of lithium grease to them before fitting. They're probably sealed so won't need much. No need to de-grease. 

To be honest, I didn't notice much difference in RA after the refit, so I haven't bothered doing the Dec axis. In fact, I noticed a significant dis-improvement after fitting them, and had to do quite a bit of fine-tuning to get back to where I was beforehand. If you haven't started yet, I'd say hold off, see what difference the belt mod makes, and if you're still not happy go ahead with the bearings. Making one change at a time is a good approach so you have a better idea where you screwed up. 🙂

[CraigT82]

No real need to change the main axis bearings. They only do one full rotation every 24 hours and so are not overly important in the grand scheme of things, a clean and regrease should be fine. 

The worm shaft bearings will rotate once every couple of minutes and so are much more important, as any defects on these have the potential to ruin every sub...  I'd splash out on the best SKF ones you can get. 

Edited June 4, 2021 by CraigT82

[rainbow demon]

Hi guys 

thank you all for the advice, I have purchased new bearings, SKF, will hold off for a while then to see how the belt mod performs.

thanks again

clear skies.

[Clarkey]

Just to add to the comments above - I would only look to change the bearings if the performance shows an issue. Before the bearings I would look at adjusting the end float on the worm gear and the worm carrier. These both needed quite a bit of adjustment on both my SW mounts as they were poorly set. I also belt modded the HEQ5. I now get about 0.5 RMS from the HEQ5 and better for the AZ-EQ6 - which is about as good as can be expected from these mounts.