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  2. PSA- Check your gear mesh! (Older mounts)

Re: PSA- Check your gear mesh! (Older mounts)

Christopher Erickson
 

I design, work on and maintain professional observatories for a living.

Having a periodic maintenance checklist and a thoughtful critical spares inventory is something ALL of the pro's and more experienced amateurs do.

Cables get damaged. Connectors get corroded. Hidden cable defects finally reveal themselves. Motors go bad. Encoders malfunction. Servo controllers malfunction. Software bugs reveal themselves. Having a few spare strategic cables (a very cheap investment) can significantly speed up troubleshooting and end up saving hours, days, weeks or even MONTHS of delays and associated expenses from happening.

One particular professional observatory I first worked on about 10 years ago was off-sky for 2 years. The professional staff of the observatory had struggled with getting things operational with no success. When they finally brought me in, I tracked down five different intermittent cable problems and got them back on sky in three days.

Having a critical spares inventory is a no-brainer.

"My advice is always free and worth every penny!"

-Christopher Erickson
Observatory Engineer
Summit Kinetics
Waikoloa, Hawaii


On Sat, Aug 7, 2021 at 1:37 PM Steven Panish <scpanish@...> wrote:
It's kind of expensive to just keep as a spare, but with price no object, I agree in principle!  But my mount sits in the observatory and never goes anywhere and the cable never gets exposed to light, never (in my experience) snags.  
Steve

On Sat, Aug 7, 2021 at 2:08 PM Chris White <chris.white@...> wrote:
I dont doubt you Chris, but curious what goes wrong with the y cables?

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