Ad Astra Observatory

The polar alignment scope in my NJP has never been accurate. It’s been off since I got the mount, and there are a couple of other things that I wonder about, too; in particular, I think the mount was mishandled during shipping at one point, and it threw some stuff off.

The problem is that the polar scope is literally built into the RA axis of the mount. It is not a “user serviceable” part in any way.

All of the repair work for Takahashi mounts in the US goes through Takahashi America, which is in Texas. I talked to the guys in TX about the mount, and they are convinced that there is a problem with the polar scope. They need me to send them the mount (which weighs 65#; I’ll need a very strong box to ship it).

Then they are going to test it, and when they find that it’s broken in the way that I have told them, they are going to take the offending part out (by which I mean the entire RA axis core), ship it to Japan, and have the team at the Takahashi mother ship fix it.

The fixed part will get shipped back to TX, who will ship it back to me.

Luckily, the part that gets sent to Japan is not the whole mount; the RA axis is made of machined brass, but it probably only weigh 5 or 8 pounds.

But, the Japan drop has to be via airmail or else it will take forever.

And I get to pay for bench time in both Japan and TX.

I’d have thought that Japan would have to pay shipping on it though; I feel that it’s a manufacturing problem. However, the manufacturer’s warranty: a) only covers the original owner (which is completely screwed, if you ask me), and b) is 5 years (the mount is a 2004, which I got in 2010, so…)

Why send it to Japan? The problem is that you need an optical bench to fix the reticle in the polar scope (I assume that it’s a misaligned reticle, and not a bent RA axis), and apparently TX doesn’t have one. So I send it to them, they dismantle it to get to the part that needs fixing, and send that to JP.

It will probably be about $100 round trip to get it to TX,
another $100 round trip for the lighter part to get airmailed to JP,
plus a $200 or so in bench time for the TX guys to teardown and rebuild and the JP guys to adjust.

This assumes that there’s no actual parts involved.

So anyway, if I budget $500 I will probably be close.

It’s a lot (more than I spent on my first mount, total, in fact). But a fully tweaked out and working NJP is definitely worth it. Even in its partly-broken state, 04026 shines as an astronomy platform. I hope to own this mount for years to come. So this is an investment in my future.

This has been a problem with the mount since I got it, so I have been saving up money in my astronomy account for the day I had to ship the mount to Texas. If I hadn’t built the CNC machine last summer, I would have done it then. Anyway, I just have to scrape together enough to get it shipped to TX and then continue saving until I can afford to get it back from them.

It’s probably going to take 6 weeks or so to get the mount back from the time I ship it, so that’s not a big deal.

Time to find a box. A strong one. And lots of packing material.

Hang in there 04026. The doctor’s on the way.