Craig,

Very interesting report and I will follow the progress if you are kind enough to continue to document your activities.    I think for some reason the DEC motor meshing on my mount is also very touchy.  I did spend quite a bit of time on it last night and although I think I have good meshing, I still have some doubt.   I think you indicated that you had the newer motor box.  My mount must be older, because I don't have the newest motor box that allows a free movement of the mount so you can attain perfect balance even though it does not really have to be perfect.

One of the things I noticed on my mount is that George told me to adjust meshing in  out ever so slightly in our out so you eliminate backlash (ability to slightly move the mount without engaging the motors) yet don't apply too much engagement pressure.   I did this repeatedly and I noticed that I would adjust the spacing on the mesh so that the spur gear was easy to turn.   Then when I went back and slewed at higher speeds, the spur gears would get tight again.   I thought this was not right so I did it several times.  It seems like they get stuck and then all of a sudden they free up and the gears turn easy.   All of this is done with the cap off the box to expose the gears.  After a while I gave up on the notion that the spur gears would run easily when well meshed and ended up getting them to run easily and then placed the cap back on and tested everything out.

Certainly you do have an issue and I have some lingering doubt about my DEC meshing.   RA meshing seems to be perfect.  That motor sings a steady and constant song with no oscillations and it sounds like I think it should.  DEC is almost the same, but it does not sound the same as RA.  Also, the sticking points on my mount are around the pole as the mount shifts pointing location.

Anyways, constructive documentation of your issue will be helpful to those that come behind us with this issue.

Thanks

Use this to measure the weight reading as you pull up and down on both Dec and RA.   Make sure your moment arm is equal and pick a spot of equal distance from the centroid of the mount and match the reading pulling up and down.  Once you do that you should be well balanced.

Celestron and Meade pretty much put the kabosh on anything Cassegrain. Fact is they use plate glass optics and aluminum tubes, which together pretty much insures that you are constantly fiddling with the focus knob. Plus you have those nice heat plumes that run up the baffle tubes. Do people know that's happening? Do they really care? Probably not because they got them brand new and shiny at ridiculously low cost. And somehow they can make them work, although I'm completely baffled how they manage it.

Last night I imaged, everything worked fine, the mount parked (2) about 3am, at 8am or so I woke up, did a slew-to-zenith to do my flats.  

Two errors popped up: Error reading from DEC encoder and No Response from DEC Encoder.

But it slewed, all good there, did my flats, and experimented a bit, going to various Park positions and then a find home.  Got the errors four more times (but everything still seemed to work). 

Disassembled, brought it inside (I do it every morning) and set up in the house, I did various parks and find-home, did not get more errors, but standing and staring at the mount I saw both DEC and RA encoders change color occasionally.  98% of the time they are bright blue, but at spots as they slew the RA became orange, but the DEC because red - only for about a second as it slewed (at 1200x).  Seemed to be about the same spot as I went back and forth, and both are solid blue until right at those spots. 

I know from a recent thread that RED is bad. :) 

Interestingly in testing this indoors, it did not give an error in APCC.  If I wasn't staring at the light I would not notice.  Inside I only ran APCC, not ASCOM or NINA, but I assume this is an APCC thing only so that should not matter. 

Indoors is warm, outdoors was awfully cold -- for S.Florida.  Maybe 38f.  So I don't think it was temperature per se.  But probably 10F colder than this mount has been in so far, here.   I actually put on a long sleeved shirt to disassemble (fortunately I still had one, thankfully it was not cold enough for real shoes or long pants, I have no idea where they are). 

However, outdoors was also heavily saturated with dew, if that matters.  But that is also typical, I doubt I have ever imaged here without hitting 100% RH by morning.  I dry things off with a towel, bring it inside and let a ceiling fan blow over everything to dry them out.  So nothing unusual there. 

I have not tried adjusting or taking anything apart, pending advice. 

Any advice?   Or is this the kind of thing i should be calling the office for, not posting?   (I'm still a bit vague on preferred support paths with AP). 

Linwood

PS. New-ish 1100AE, got it late summer.  Outside it was carrying a very light Np101is, so probably 25# or so. Inside it was carrying nothing.

I was not as fortunate.  My 1600 w/auto adjusting worm mesh, is about 5 years old and I am putting a new OTA on it.  So I figured while switching telescopes I would service the mount, including re-greasing the RA and DEC worm gear.  The greasing part went well, got the old grease off and the new grease went on without a hitch.  To do this I had to remove both the RA and DEC motors.  I got instructions on how to do this from AP which went perfectly.  And now the BUT.  Following the motor install instructions from AP to the T (several times) I put the motors back on and now the mount sounds like a machine shop cutting pipes.  As another user reported, this sounds like my iOptron CEM60 when you re-mesh the worm too tight and have to back it off a bit.  This happens so often with the CEM60 that iOptron provided a procedure on how to fix it.  I have not found such a procedure yet from AP.

I have attached an audio recording of what it sounds like.  The setup is the 1600 without any OTA and CW bar.  But it does have the DEC saddle on it and is in the Park 3 position.  I tested only the DEC motor since it is not balanced in RA but is perfectly balanced in DEC.  I ran the APJog utility from AP which connects to the V2 ASCOM driver and to the mount.  Once connected to the mount I unparked the scope from the last park position.  Move speed was set to 64x for the first test.  Pressing first the "N" button and then the "S" button you can hear the DEC motor as it moves (Test 1).  After the test I clicked the Park button (APJog) to park the scope at the current position.  Clearly the mesh is too tight, but without any instructions on what to do in this case I blindly tried lots of things.

For Test 2, I moved the worm engagement lever to half way so it was still engaged but could be disengaged by hand.  I loosened the attachment bolts (3 of them) and then pulled back on the motor to full disengage it.  With the motor manually disengaged I tightened the attachment bolts and then fully engaged the lever on the side.  The idea here was to try and back off the worm a bit and yet have the engagement lever in the fully engaged position.  I did a new recording at 64x move speed and you can hear the noise is pretty much gone.  I then changed the move speed to 200x (Test 3) and repeated the N and S moves.  As you can hear, the noise is really bad.  So in this state it moves correctly N and S at 64x but makes a horrible sound at 200x.  I am guessing it is some sort of resonance?

George has had me try several other things but so far nothing as worked.  Hopefully this week, between George and other users who have experienced this problem (from the Youtube videos and Forum postings), there will be a modified procedure for attaching the motor to the mount or a method to tweak the motor afterwards (similar to what iOptron did) to get the motors sounding smooth again and help others who run into the same problem.

Craig