Herschel,
good to see it's all starting to make sense.
The answers to your questions.
- My Velcro adjustment tab is located on the 0 or 360 deg position of the circle
- I start by placing the Velcro in the middle of the adjustment piece on the base
- I then put the base down and try to have my pointer directed due west (my set-up) which means my adjustment tab is due north
- I then align on a star I know the co-ordinates of and fine tune the Velcro adjustment to get it as close as possible to the correct azimuth setting.
- After practicing this a few times, I normally only need to rotate the circle a few degrees to correct it.
- If you add about 150mm of Velcro to the base as the adjustment, this would give you about 30 degrees of azimuth adjustment which is may more than you should need.
- If I relocate the scope, I start the alignment process again - which takes no more than 1 or 2 minutes. It's that easy once you get the hang of it.
- My pointer is a cooking skewer that I pinched from the kitchen draw. Cut and drilled into the base to securely attach it. Never been damaged yet and it's easy to replace if needed. It is fixed in position and I don't remove it.
- I would place the cutout section on the side of the scope you view objects, right beneath where you would be standing. If placed on the front or back, or other side, it would be difficult to use and you'll find you're walking around the scope all the time.
For your process, here's a couple of other comments.
- when you get it printed, go with the smallest size than fits the drawing. I'm not sure what size you'll need, but you may not have to go up to the A1 size - this just costs you less
- depending on the stiction of your azimuth bearing and weight of the scope on the lazy susan bearing, you may not be able to place the circle on top of or below the lazy susan as it might be too hard to rotate. If I recall what I did, I placed my circle perfectly on the base. Once located, I carefully added the hole for the centre bolt to ensure I was centred, then I scribed and cutover the lazy susan. So my circle rotates around the outside of my lazy susan.
- the Velcro I used for both pieces was 2 sided - easy !!!!
- everything else looks good.
The Wixeys are ingenious. Once I had mine levelled to zero, I stopped re-zeroing each set-up as I place it on exactly the same spot on the scope every time.
With the Azimuth Circle and Altitude Wixey in place, finding targets will by pretty damn easy. This set-up is not as good as say an Argo Navis in finding really faint fuzzies, but it's a significant leap above star hopping which I have just never gotten my head around.
I remember my first target with my set-up was Tarantula Nebula. I spent about 10 minutes the prior session trying to find it and eventually did. After installing my set-up, doing a few alignment checks on stars, I then went to Tarantula. I think I would have had a 24mm Panoptic in at the time (so about 64x magnification and 1.1 deg FOV) and hey presto there she was in the middle of my eyepiece
Take your time with the modifications, and all should be good.
Paul