Question RA motor dead?

Hi everyone,

I recently purchased (second hand) an Avalon M-zero and was very happy with it for the first month. Everything was going fine, excellent guiding accuracy, only trying to troubleshot some stability issues while using ekos to control the mount. Friday night, when I started the mount for an observing session, the mount would not move in RA. The setup was exactly the same as before. Everything was properly balanced. When I try to slew in RA, I can hear the motor making a very faint noise, much less than the noise that it normally makes while slewing fast, and the mount does not move at all.

I tried a different power supply, same result. I also tried to swap the RA and DEC cables, same thing. It looks like the RA motor just lost all of its power. The only thing I can think off is that I had left the mount outside the whole week because the weather was beautiful and I did not want to have to redo the polar alignment. I did wrap the mount in a "space blanket" to protect it from the sun (loosely, to allow for air circulation - it was hot this week in Mississippi). So, I wonder if the motor suffered from excessive heat? If that is the case, it would mean that this mount is basically unusable for solar observing in warm climates (unless one were to engineer a system to keep it cool). Maybe the spell of warm weather and mount issue are just unrelated.

Any suggestion on how to proceed? Is it difficult to open the mount and check/replace the motor? Any other ideas as to what could be causing the problem and how to troubleshot?

Because I'm in the US, I'd like to avoid having to send the mount back to Italy.

Thank you,

Jean-Francois

Thank you for your response. Looking forward to the email with the instructions.

jf

...can you update on this? what was the reason?
I think the instructions given by Avalon could be helpful for others ..
Peter