Need help on how to move telescopes

My father was an avid amateur astronomer but is now 90 years old and can no longer use his equipment. I am getting ready to sell his estate and want to bring his telescopes from his home near San Francisco to my home in Seattle. I am not an knowledgeable astronomer but do know you need to be very careful when you disassemble and transport telescopes. I am looking for advice on what I need to do to dismount the scopes (Meade 16 inch LX200GPS and a Celestron 16 inch) along with two Software Bisque ME mounts and transport them back to my house. I know you need to lock mirrors and such but do not know how to do this. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you
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Hi Scott:

I've never owned the types of telescopes your father has, so I can't help you with mirror locking and so forth. I do know that your best bet for selling this equipment is this web site, assuming that you want to sell it. You'll get a much better price than you would on Craig's list or an estate sale. You could place ads here and possibly find some Bay-Area buyers willing to pick up the gear so that you do not need to move it or ultimately ship it.

If you are going to keep the gear, I'm sure someone will be along presently with a link to the owner's manuals or a step-by-step guide.

Jim

Hi Scott,
There is one important thing that is not intuitive on shipping a mount and that is NOT to lock the mount axis locks. They must stay free so any shock to the equipment does not stress the gears. To move freely means the gears do not get stripped or bent. This applies to the locks on the Meade 16" fork mount as well on both axises.
On the 16 in cassegrain meade turn the focus knob clockwise till it stops and this will pull the main mirror all the way to the back of the scope housing and keep it from flopping around. If you look inside the tube you can see the mirror moving closer to the back if you are turning in the right direction (in case I'm mistaken on the direction of turning).
Note if there is a "focus lock" knob loosen it first before doing the above.
Then if you like you can turn it back the lock position when you have the mirror at the back of the housing. The purpose of the mirror lock is to stop the mirror from moving once the scope is focused, so doing the focus knob routine above is more advised.

LAST when shipping anything especially astronomy gear there must be no shifting of the item in the package. This means when you shake the box you must not have any movement of the item in the box. If it moves it breaks or causes something else to break as it moves around in side the box as it's thrown around.