Fine adjustment Alt/Az plate

[montewilson (Monte)]

Hi Guys - I thought I would show you some pictures of my new alt/az plate. I wasn't happy with the coarsness of the mount's adjustments. They are far from bad but with TPoint and Automapper I can find out polar alignment errors in seconds of arc. I realized I could never make the adjustments even when I knew how much I had to move the scope.

This is the answer and it works very well. I can now make adjustments down to a few arc seconds. The plate is 25mm aluminium. The thread on the altitude bolt is M20x0.5 which of course was custom made. It gives me 6 arc mins per revolution.

It is not light but I think it is a worthwhile additon to my kit.

[h0ughy (David)]

awesome, and your right thats a very large hunk of Aluminium. Thanks for showing us that, might help in the future for an observatory setup

[DeanoNZL (Adrian)]

Mate, that is a piece of work!
Has given me some great idea's...
Many thanks for the info

[Lee]

Looks awesome.....
The lack of super fine adjustment has always bugged me a bit with the G-11 mount too....

[gbeal]

Man Monty, you have way too much time on your hands, just shoot shorter subs, LOL.

[Dennis]

That has to be the best piece of engineering design and build that I have ever seen, for an Alt-Az plate.

Cheers

Dennis

[montewilson (Monte)]

Fellas - thanks for the booster comments. While I like to impress my IIS friends, the truth is with this at least, it had to be overbuilt. If we are talking about arc second accuracy then all flexure has to be eliminated.

I am toying with the idea of making a commercial version of it. I saw one comment about the G11 being hard to finely adjust. Are there other mount owners who are unhappy with theirs in this regard?

[gary]

Originally Posted by montewilson

Hi Guys - I thought I would show you some pictures of my new alt/az plate. I wasn't happy with the coarsness of the mount's adjustments. They are far from bad but with TPoint and Automapper I can find out polar alignment errors in seconds of arc. I realized I could never make the adjustments even when I knew how much I had to move the scope.

This is the answer and it works very well. I can now make adjustments down to a few arc seconds. The plate is 25mm aluminium. The thread on the altitude bolt is M20x0.5 which of course was custom made. It gives me 6 arc mins per revolution.

It is not light but I think it is a worthwhile additon to my kit.

Hi Monte,

Nicely engineered and looks brilliant!

I can see you didn't muck about and all that aluminium will help keep
world commodity prices buoyant.

However, it is exactly what you need and really closes the loop with
your TPOINT run.

Best regards

Gary Kopff
Wildcard Innovations Pty. Ltd.