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Charlie Hein
Postmaster
Reged: 11/02/03
Posts: 6571
Loc: 26.06.08N, +80.23.08W
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Re: Can this worm wheel be saved?
06/23/08 06:56 AM
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Yep. It's a mess all right. What I'm looking to find out is if this wheel can be repaired or if I have to buy another worm wheel somehow.
John - I don't think that the design of the mount lends itself to spring loading the worm against the wheel but that would surely be an ideal solution for avoiding the possibility of over tightening if it could.
Jim - in fact I had a new worm gear made a couple of years ago for the RA axis.
As I mentioned it's been running okay from a PE standpoint (I've been using it for imaging at some long exposure times - autoguided of course - with good results) but I've never been pleased with the worm mesh ever since it came back. It was either too sloppy when it ran as smooth as the DEC or much stiffer than the DEC when the backlash was taken up. Looking at this wheel it's not hard to see why.
I'm sure that I could just put it back together and use it as is - but at best I would be stuck with the same difficulty getting a good balance between smooth running and workable mesh forever. Knowing that it's not right will bug me forever, too. I'd really like to cure this for good and all when I put the mount back together.
I'm tempted to set the wheel up to the worm correctly and see what happens but I'm afraid that the damage is too great and at best the results would be worse than just leaving it alone.
I don't know of a machine shop in my area that can do this kind of work. Moreover, even if I find one I'm wondering if resurfacing this wheel would alter the tracking.
The best solution may be to find someone who has maybe installed a new worm and wheel in their Atlas/EQ6. A guy in Germany made some nice ones and someone may have an old wheel lying around that I can talk them out of.
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Weston CSC:
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