Celestron SCT Disassembly and Modification

[curtisca17]

A few years back I over tightened my hyperstar on my C14 and had to remove the corrector plate to get it off.  But, I never personally completely disassembled an SCT.  Last Christmas I helped my friend Dave tear down his Celestron C11 when he decided to make some modifications to his scope.  He was mainly interested in reducing mirror flop and had read about a procedure to add some nylon screws to the outer baffle to take up some of the play between the outer and inner baffle tubes.  He also took the opportunity to add a BT weather station inside, some fans to direct air flow across the primary mirror, regrease the baffle tubes and flock the inside of the Al tube.  In the process Dave found a problem with the Celestron motorized focuser which likely leads to additional mirror flop, not shift, and fixed that.  I checked my C11 (did not need to tear down the scope to do this) and found the same flaw which I also fixed in a different way from Dave.  Others have reported this same flaw in the Celestron focuser hardware, but I have not seen anyone ascribing mirror flop to the problem before this.  Regardless, the fix seems to have helped reduce image drift substantially in Dave's scope. 

While helping him I videoed the entire process and have created the first of three videos that I thought I would share.  I broke this down into 3 videos because it would be too long as one big video and, there really are 3 different things going on here.  The first video shows the process in detail for completely disassembling the SCT and also how to put it back together after.  That one is already posted and you can find it here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTJs4r5Oj58  
 
Hopefully this will help anyone who needs to take their SCT apart, even if only to remove the corrector plate and not do a full disassembly.  As soon as I get time, I will edit and post the video showing the problem we discovered with the Celestron focuser and the fixes we both used.  And later, I can put together and post the final video which shows the main reason for opening up the SCT.  I think you will find some of Dave's upgrades interesting.
 
Best Regards,
Curtis