MX Doesn't Work

[Logieberra (Logan)]

Contact SB. Ask them to pair you up with another MX (or ME2) user in that part of the world. Buddy-up and see how that goes. Two heads being better than one and all that.

[NilRecurring]

Originally Posted by Logieberra

Contact SB. Ask them to pair you up with another MX (or ME2) user in that part of the world. Buddy-up and see how that goes. Two heads being better than one and all that.

There aren't any here, I'm afraid. I've asked around all the astronomy clubs so I'm stuck trying to fix someone else's mistake.

[frolinmod]

I guess only you and Steve Bisque can determine where to go from here. Shipping you a bunch of parts vs. shipping the mount back for repair/replacement/refund.

[gregbradley]

Fairs fair. I think you're close to needing to sending it back to them at their expense and they can do THEIR job and fiddle with it.

At what stage you have reached that point is up to you.

There was another poster here who had trouble and it was eventually detected and repaired ( a loose cable to the motor).

I would make a personal deadline for it to be sorted before it gets shipped back at their expense for in factory repairs/replacement. A certain amount of tolerance I think is workable in this pursuit as they are all small companies and boutique manufacturers. But it still was an expensive purchase and you are spending all your unpaid time debugging their faulty workmanship instead of imaging.

I think SB have had some terrible QC troubles with this mount. Lucky is the person who got one that worked straight out of the box. I am sure there must have been some.

I had some difficulty with mine but luckily minor compared to this. Once sorted though it is a spectacular performer and that is the carrot here.

Greg.

[NilRecurring]

Greg, thank you for your response. I don't even want to send the entire mount back, I think if they just sent me a new worm-block for RA it should fix this issue. The problem is now only confined to the RA axis and is really as simple as this:

1) Mount stalls with 2.5 turns worth of pressure.
2) Ease of the pressure at 3.5 turns and there is 1-2mm worth of play in the axis.

I've just emailed Mr. Steve Bisque and have explained the situation. I'm leaving on Monday for a business trip for 10 days so won't be able to tweak the mount anyway, if they ask me. What I'm hoping for is that they send out a replacement worm-block, and that it arrives around the time I'm back from my trip. I am hoping that all I have to do is install the new worm-block and just get on with my imaging.

I do believe someone here had an out-of-spec worm and he was sent just the worm-block and wasn't asked to send the entire mount back. I'm hoping that's how they treat my case because 1-2mm worth of play is clearly out-of-spec for this class of a mount.

[gregbradley]

They sent me a replacement worm block after mine developed a spike in PE that resulted in double stars.

The new block was easy to install (about 45 minutes or less) and it worked straight away.

Yes it seems the worm block is the critical component here that seems to be causing the most trouble. They must have had some QC issues with their supplier or in their workshop on these. The later ones seem good.

Greg.

[NilRecurring]

Originally Posted by gregbradley

Yes it seems the worm block is the critical component here that seems to be causing the most trouble.

Yes, while I don't fully understand the inner workings of the worm-block it does seem simple enough: the motor drives the worm via a belt, and the block has a mechanism to put some pressure on the worm/gear via some springs. The block also has a mechanism to separate from the gear if there is too much force present.

My assumption (please correct me if I'm wrong) is that by replacing the worm-block I will be replacing the entire mechanism that drives the main gear so if there anything wrong with the RA axis (apart from the main 7.5" gear being damaged) a replacement should fix it.

Why I don't think it's the main gear: if it was, the problem would be far less frequent! The gear moves quite slowly, after all and if the mount stalls it shouldn't stall again for quite some time - but that is not the case. I can produce stalls within 10 minutes of each other.

[cfranks (Charles)]

They sent me 2 worm blocks! Fixed my problem but it was not a difficult to diagnose / quantify as yours though.

Charles

[Logieberra (Logan)]

True. A error in RA worm gear will show every worm cycle, somewhere between 2-3mins from memory. Issues with a out-of-round RA main gear would be less frequent, with many hours of imaging until you'd perhaps hit a 'high spot', if that is even the cause. We're just speculating here. SB will advise.