It has a larger RA gear and a small worm gear to drive it. The CEM 26 is a fairly typical equatorial drive. So dealing with an ever-changing level of DEC backlash was frustrating. I really wish that IOptron had made both parts of metal, and then maybe I could control this issue. It turns out that one part of the mount was plastic - and I was afraid to crank down too tightly on the mount for fear of cracking the plastic. So if things are drifting - then just tighten the motor mount screw more so that they don’t move with time - right? Then I could tighten the screws holding the motor. Not a convenient thing.Īdjusting the tension meant that I had to remove the outer drive housing, loosen the screws that mounted the belt drive motor, and then use a screwdriver to leverage the motor such that more tension was placed on the mount. It also meant that I had to keep adjusting the tension. This meant the backlash on the DEC axis was constantly changing - not a good thing. I found that over time, the belt tension would change, and my DEC backlash would begin to grow again. The residual backlash was easily handled by the PHD2’s backlash compensation mechanism and the right DEC guiding parameters.Īt this point, I was happy with the solution - if it stayed constant. Increasing the tension reduced the backlash from 5 seconds to under 1 second. I found I had over 5 seconds of backlash when I first received the mount, so I contacted IOptron support, and they quickly provided me with a one-page procedure for adjusting the tension of the DEC drive belt. The first issue I ran into was backlash on the DEC axis.
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