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Trevor, You dont have to do a star alignment before, or in between drift alignment iterations.
Fire up the mount, enter all the usual info time/date/viewing location etc. it asks "do you want to perform a star alignment, hit 2 (no) unlock the mount axis, point it to the star you intend to drift align on, lock the axis.
Hit setup on the hand controller, scroll through the list untill you find "tracking" hit enter. scroll through until you find 'Sidereal tracking' hit enter.
Drift align as usual. (this should save you plenty of time!)
Also, it should not take longer than an hour to get the alignment pretty spot on... even for a beginner (like myself) making rather massive adjustments at the beginning is key to making the process swift..
Using K3CCDTools' "drift explorer" you can within seconds see both the direction, and amount of drift via a webcam.. and from there, make the necessary large or small adjustment (dependent on the amount of drift), recenter the star in the webcams field of view, and within seconds, get a live readout of how my better or worse that adjustment made the alignment...
I saw this performed for the first time last weekend, and Paul '[1ponders]' was polar aligned within 20 minutes turning on the mount...
If thats not THE best way to do it, I dont know what is.
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