Quote:
Originally Posted by MattT
Hi Bo,
When not in use and it looks fine (not heavy rain that is) I cover the scope with a couple of tarps tied down and hope for the best  I did manage to leave the scope out covered one night last year...so I thought...wake up in the night to hear rain falling and not worry about it as the scope was covered, but not tied down....woops. Of course wind had blown the tarp off and the mount and scope had been rained on for a few hours. No damage done to anything.... lucky me. At least the electric parts, hand controller Nexus etc was indoors. Now I tie the tarps down  It takes about 10 minutes to mount the scope when its off the mount, not hard once I worked out how to do it.
One mod is to the Dec axis which was very 'rubbery' I added a 6mm plate bolted down with 11 bolts and machine screws and now it doesn't flex at all.
After a few months of stuffing around with sliding weights and adding an 8x50 Sky Watcher straight through finder, I needed a second finder, it is now complete. My solution to the East heavy problem is a 500g brass sliding weight at the focuser end...slid it down when the scope is on the East side to maintain gear mesh on the RA.
I have settled on an 80mm f7.5 achro with a TS 2" field flattener on a 2" GSO dielectric diagonal as the wide field scope, which gives 4º TFOV with a Pan 35 showing pinpoint stars to the very edge...an improvment over having the last 20% suffering Field Curvature.
The Byers gear tracks smoothly and now having found the perfect balance I can change from a TEC turret to a Pan 41 to WO Binos with the scope not moving, other than tracking.
Even though I built this scope and mount there was still a learning curve to use it.
Solid as a rock and moves like a well oiled machine 
Matt |
No I won't comment. .....WORDS FAIL ME!!
bigjoe.