Balancing Mount for Auto-Meridian flips

General
1

I am getting closer to trying the meridian flip features of SGP and have a question about balancing my mount. Standard practice is to have the mount balance loaded to the east for tracking performance. I do this with my CGE Pro, but now I was wondering what to do for meridian flips that are automated. Should I just get it as balanced as possible? That seems to be the only logical approach. My mount does have spring loaded worm assembles, so maybe that makes the off-balance unnecessary?

Thanks for any insight.
Pete

2

As long as your mount isn’t grossly out of balance it shouldn’t make much
difference as far as the meridian flip is concerned. With my G11 I
carefully balance the mount and then slightly off-balance it by moving
the counterweight out a little bit, and also off-balance in DEC just a
little bit. This assures that no matter which side the scope is on the RA
teeth are engaged. I don’t know how a CGE compares but I’m guessing it’s
similar.

3

Yup. There are ways to automate getting your mount E or W heavy… I just balance it as good as I can and it seems to work just fine.

4

I use a counterweight system that always pulls east. So it keeps everything East Bias.

Here’s the initial mock up. There’s a 7lb weight on the end of that. Works well!

Untitled

Thanks,
Jared

1 Like
5

That is a great idea Jared. I will have to look into implementing that somehow on my mount if the balanced approach does not work.

6

As long as your mount isn’t grossly out of balance it shouldn’t make much
difference as far as the meridian flip is concerned. With my G11 I
carefully balance the mount and then slightly off-balance it by moving
the counterweight out a little bit, and also off-balance in DEC just a
little bit. This assures that no matter which side the scope is on the RA
teeth are engaged. I don’t know how a CGE compares but I’m guessing it’s
similar.