Cable dressing and new timing pulleys arrive.

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As a change to wasting precious time on the wrong trousers software I'm looking at cable dressing. I need a retaining clip somewhere near the center of the Dec housing. The clip or loop will have to be held by one of the furniture nuts to avoid making and threading new holes. Limiting the cables to the center of the mounting should avoid the constant checking that nothing has pulled tight during a Goto slew.

The sheer range of movement is such that cables can reach their limits quite quickly. The camera is on the end of a 1.3m long lever. Which really eats up cable running back to the laptop on the north side of the pier. Being USB3 rather limits the options to 3m or 5m depending on who you consult. They can't both be right. Can they? For longer extension I'd need to go active. Active USB3 cables cost about £20. The supplied ZWO cable is only 2m. While 3m would have been just enough. I can feel another order coming on soon.

Remind the [idiot] observatory supervisor that AWR needs UT for RTC. NOT local time! Not that it made any difference when I readjusted RTC by the two hours difference. LST now matched the online calculators and C-du-C when I hovered the cursor over S or 180°. The trouble is that it still couldn't find Polaris from a hole in the ground! I kid you not! With no other change [-2H in UT] the telescopes started straight into a nose down slew to reach the North Pole!

It took six days for PostNord to deliver these two tiny, toothed timing pulleys, for £4 equivalent in postage, in a small padded envelope. These are a 20T and a 30T GT2 2mm pitch. Now I'll need to bore them out to 6mm to fit the Skywatcher [clone] focuser motor.

On the last 14T pulley I used a brand new, 6mm drill in the tailstock chuck. The bore ended up rather oversize. So I think I'll use 5.5mm drill instead. Then run a tiny boring tool through to take very tiny cuts until it just fits the motor shaft nicely. This worked but was rather slow. The natural spring in the long, thin, boring tool provided a nice snug fit once the shaft could just enter.

I'll need to confirm that the gear ratio is not too high for the little, gearbox motor when it is driven. It might be better to raise the motor speed in the HitecAstro software. We'll see how it goes. The 30T will need a motor plate redesign to get the pulley near enough to the focuser knob without needing to buy a longer belt.

I hope to get away with the 20T without any change to the motor support plates or the belt. That would give me a boost in focuser speed of 1.43:1. Which would be 12 seconds instead of 17 seconds per cm of focuser movement.

Click on any image for an enlargement.

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