Gday Mark
Just a few comments
Quote:
|
I think you will find the quality of the gears etc in the LX200 is quite good (as long as your's has the brass transfer gears and not the plastic ones).
|
Just for info, many people still use the original plastic gears quite happily
and they are quite fit for purpose when correctly installed.
When you look at the toothcounts and gear reduction involved, it takes around a 1% "relative" error in the transfer gears teeth to give 1arcsec error at the OTA. The rest of the geartrain swamps this.
The biggest problem generally identified with the Meades are they use straight cut wormwheels, vs fully enveloped worms, and this can result in more point contact and hence tooth to tooth variability on how the worms interact.
Quote:
|
The main problem lies with the crappy motor/transfer gear/ worm mounting bracket they use. A small error when drilling the holes to mount the motor through the drill drifting will cause the mesh of the transfer gears to be less then satisfactory by any stretch of the imagination (mine had about 30% engagement at best). Of course this is not adjustable.
|
The transfer gear mesh IS adjustable within a set range, and most peoples drives do fall within this range.
You may have been unlucky, but most do fit reasonably well.
The original factory fitting sometimes leaves a lot to be desired,
but most of it is easily tweaked.
That said, the gears in the Meades are not good enough in most cases to allow long duration unguided tracking with long focal lengths.
Andrew