Posts Made By: Frederic Caron

Hi Joe,
if you switch from your standard wedge to a Superwedge, you will never believe it !

I've an Ultima 11 on a Meade Superwedge and Giant field tripod and trust me, i'll never go back.....NEVER !

Fred

Hi James,
i've built a printed circuit which include a 555 chip to pulse the DC motors. The potentiometer used for the reticle eyepiece was changed to adjust the pulses of the 555 chip. I've built a push-button hand controller instead of the F***ing toggle switch comming with the original C14 drive base. I've included two reverse switch to be able to reverse the HC buttons on each axis like my Ultima drive base.

The precision of the guiding speed is 2.8 arcseconds ( potentiometer at minimum ) and it's near slewing at the maximum. I've built a jumper switch to have directly to slew speed and to avoid passing through the printed circuit which was designed to produce guiding speed with the 555 chip.

I've not modified the gearing yet. I really want to test it before. I'll adjust it to reach the maximum precision i can before removing it and replacing it by probably Byers gears. The C14 fork mount have a really bad reputation for tracking but i want to confirm it myself. I'm sure it can be improved a lot only by mechanical adjustments.

The 16" LX200 tripod is an incredible platform. I've built a latitude adjuster for my C14 wedge which consist in two one inch thick aluminium block, a 5/8 threaded rod and a knob for adjustments. The end of the rod has a small teflon bloc. Ultra smooth adjustments are done with the aluminium-teflon contact.

I'll modify the rail system on the tube holders to allow a quick release of OTA from the fork arms.


Regards,


Fred