JayTee wrote: ↑Tue Jun 23, 2020 12:19 am
This may sound silly, but is the EQ6R Pro light enough to pick up and shake to see if there is a rattling noise? Otherwise, if the washer is magnetic, maybe try a small magnet to probe around and see if the magnet picks anything up.
Cheers,
JT
Thanks JT
I tried that and looked inside too and looked all over the ground where the mount was and it is not a big area and actually sits on fake grass so it would be easy to find. I am thinking it could of been loose or fell off for awhile and the belt slipped off right at the most perfect time when my skies where the best and had a whole night planned with a Jupiter animation with the 1.5x barlow with Europa and IO and Europa's shadow along Ganymede getting eclipsed at the end. Anyway long story short. I contacted Skywatcher and they said I had to mail the head back because of the warranty and they will take out the motors and everything and recalibrate it and stuff to make sure it is good. I asked for a replacement head and they didnt have any and that my issue didn't warrant one. Hmm
Anyway the turnaround time is estimated at 4 weeks to get it back, I tried everything I could and asked just to send the washer retainer part. But with it falling off after little use like that, then maybe there was something more to it and the belt had shavings around the area. The most weight I had on it was under 30lbs and that was just for a 4-5 nights doing planetary, So lucky me now with my brand new C-11 and my RC8 have nothing to do for a month. I still got my ED80 and contemplating getting a used mount or something. I sold my AVX to help fund this too.
So now my next steps is working on getting another mount. Option 1 if I can convince the CFO to get an IOptron CEM60 and then sell the skywatcher when it comes back. or get something that I can us my ED80 with and just keep as a travel mount. Also thinking if I came across a decent AVX for a good price then go with that. But I am not sure if it will do a C-11 for Planetary?
But out of all of this last night I managed to put the belt on and manualy aimed it at Jupiter around 3am and just use the
RA buttons nd the
DEC very lightly so it would not slip. So I do have a bunch of images I took that I got to process. The polar alignment was knocked out so I had to do the good old drift with Jupiter and Saturn just like I did with my
Dob lol
Also a thought, this was a perfect time to build my All Sky Cam lol, now I get to look it and cringe at the Clear skies especially since the weather said there should be a few days of clear skies this week.