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Found the problem and a simple correction to the set-up fixed all the problems, the motors knocking and the pointing being simply crappy. Its was so easy when I figured it out. The thing that twigged me to it was I tried doing a 3 star align using Antares, Acturus and Spica - in under 5 minutes as the cloud cover started to roll in. Well Antares was star numer one and the scope pointed below the horizon. Then for star 2 I stopped it just before the motors went to hit. Spica was totally wrong. So got these entered in under 10 minutes and searched for Jupiter - again the motors went to collide and nothing I could do manual slewing to any position and then executing Goto when close to Jupiter could stop a motor collision. At this point I was think what a piece of total **** this mount was... I tried a factory reset and no joy there either.
Then it hit me. I re-powered and set the scope to its initial trangles pointing to each other on each axis position and stopped the set-up and checked the axes positions. Bingo - 0 00 00 and 90 00 00 - DEC was ninety degrees out as it had arrived from the factory. So I simply manually slewed back to a point where the mount axes said 0 00 00 and 0 00 00, then released the clutches and moved the DEC axis back to its alignment mount. I re-powered and what a difference! Initial set-up and slewing to the first 3 alignment stars was good. And the motor drives never clunked. I executed a few gotos - Antares, Spica, Jupiter, Alpha Centura and M4 - beautiful, absolutely beautiful. Close to centred even on my rough set-up and the motors moved very cleverly around each other and never touched once!
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