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Avalon Linear
After a relatively uneventful trip from Germany, my Avalon Linear has arrived. As my laptop has just gone back for repair, and it's cloudy tonight (and for the foreseeable future), I can't speak to much more than the aesthetics and the machining at this stage.
You have to dismantle the wedge and make an adjustment to use the mount at our latitude. It's relatively straight-forward, and there's instructions and photographs included in the manual (which comes on a nice little USB stick).
Also at our latitude, you can no longer use the "front" altitude knob, but rather you must swap it out for a hex head bolt. This bolt leaves a tiny, tiny gap between its head and the mount, and I fear adjusting it may be tedious. I'll report back on that once I've actually tried to polar align it, but for now I have my reservations.
The mount comes with an adapter plate, enabling you to mount this on tripods made for the EQ6. Photos show how this attaches on the stock EQ6 tripod. Just to make that doubly clear, the ugly tripod shown did not come with this mount, that's the stock-standard Skywatcher EQ6 tripod.
I'll have to drill a couple of new holes in my pier to mount this, however I'm happy to do so because I think it'll hold a lot better than the "one thread up through the bottom" it currently has to work with on the EQ6.
The mount comes with 1x6kg counterweight. Thinking I'd need an extra counterweight to balance my gear, I bought an aftermarket 2.6kg Baader counterweight (simply because the Avalons were out of stock). Turns out the 6kg counterweight balances my 12.3kg payload fine. Photo with the Esprit shows the counterweight position when balanced.
I'll post more when I get a chance to use it, but it may be a while. I need to get my laptop fixed, and I need to build this thing a new "micro-obs" (glorified ply box) to live in.
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