How to rebuild your Chinese CG5/EQ5 mount

[Omaroo (Chris Malikoff)]

Not a bad description here of how to go about improving the performance of your Chinese mount. Not bad at all, and with the added benefit of quite a lot of pictures:

http://www.astronomyboy.com/cg5/

Have fun!

Cheers
Chris

[snowyskiesau]

This is a great set of instructions. I've used it previously to tune a Vixen SP mount and I'm in the process of doing the same to a Vixen GP mount.

[Omaroo (Chris Malikoff)]

Good news Geoff! How did your SP perform after the exercise?

[snowyskiesau]

The SP certainly felt smoother and required less force to move in both RA and DEC. The motors seemed to be a bit quieter afterwards but I think that may have been more wishful thinking than fact
I couldn't find a supply of the white lithium grease so I used a more readily available green grease from BP.
It takes some scrubbing to get all the old grease out but it had been there 15 years.
Only takes a couple of hours for the rebuild but at least than much time and more to get the backlash adjusted.

[sheeny (Al)]

Thanks Chris. When I get some spare time I'll have a read. Could be handy.

Al.

[Geoff45 (Geoff)]

I did this with my mount. It worked pretty well afterwards. I took 30 pics of omega centauri at 30s each (unguided), chucked out about 5 because of erratic errors and stacked the rest. The pic shows the result.
Geoff

[ving (David)]

page bookmarked

[snowyskiesau]

Just finished going through this procedure with my recently acquired Vixen GP mount.
It only took an hour or so to disassemble and clean and another hour to reassemble and
adjust the backlash.
A lot easier than the SP mount I did a while back as the CG5 and EQ5 are more a copy of the GP than the SP. The backlash adjustment was much quicker.
I'll install the drive motors and give it a test tomorrow.

[Omaroo (Chris Malikoff)]

Excellent Geoff - looking forward to your opinion of the result.

Cheers
Chris