Build your own motor drive?

I am collecting parts for a motor drive, any one else try this? What problems did you not expect? I plan to run a 1rpm or so timing motor and gear it down with a worm drive and several belt drives. Any thoughts on steppers vs/ servos/vs timing motors? How did your drive do in cold temps? Anyone?
Thanks,
Sean

Here's a very simple and cheap drive..

Ed

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Check my photos under equipment in the customer gallery. For about $10 in hardware store parts plus a $4 motor I was able to build a drive that tracks for 2 hours accurately enough for unguided high-resolution astro-photography for up to several minutes per exposure. It takes about 5 seconds to reset the drive and a couple minutes for it to settle in for really good tracking when it is reset. I used a 1 rph AC synchronous motor that winds a tow line to pull the scope along the RA axis - no gears except for the ones in the 1rph motor itself. Although I built it on a cg5 mount, it could be done with any equatorial mount. The motor is driven by a 12 volt gel battery hooked up to an inverter to convert the 12vdc to 110vac. My next step is to work on the inverter to allow for frequency adjustment that will allow for changing the speed of the motor so that drive speed corrections can be made if desired.

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