Trading for an electronic mount

[river]

Hi weedee,

Good suggestion. However, schools cannot purchase second-hand items.

Also have to buy from registed company, might have problem during audit if buy from individual.

I think selling off two damage GOTO to buy another GOTO is risky. You never know how long can the 8"GOTO setup survive in your school astro club, it may end up like the 5" GOTO one day. Then, you/your junior will have no more resources to trade-off to fix the 8" GOTO. Non-electronic setup is cheaper, easier to maintain and fix.

Since the two 5" optic are ok, I suggest to revive the two scopes with minimum $$$ cost. And get more people to join the club, once you have more people then you ask for fund to buy the GOTO mount.

You can consider:
0) Let CC take a look and see if things can be fixed.

1) A DIY project to get/make two mounts for the 5".
2) Use petty cash to buy some wood and make a mount like Chris Yeo's design.
3) If you got $$, buy your own tripod/mount. Use it with the school's scopes. After all, you are the one who get to enjoy the view.
4) Find a few rich Alumni to sponsor a mount (they just got their progress package, you might be lucky).

[Lee]

Hi guys,

This is actually an on-going Commercial proposal to VJC from The Physical Space and should normally be discussed between parties involved and not openly in a forum. We also like to highlight that most of our Commercial Transaction do not follow the Pricing / Service Support norms that forum such as Singastro advocates (though we wish we can).

Anyway, since Jia Wei had brought up this issue here I will explain further.

VJC had bought from us in year 2000 2 units of EC-125 c/w std accessories & some spares for S$ 7,000. Based on A/C depreciation of up to 5 years (might even be shorter) the book value of this 2 units EC-125 is S$ 0.

The current price for 2 units new EC-125 to VJC is S$ 7,500.

Sometimes back in Feb, I checkout the VJC EC-125 and found that both the units Dec are not working and suspected the Dec Gear assembly. And we can only replaced the entire Dec Gear assembly (>S$350 ea). Upon closer verification I found that many nos of the Dec Fork Inserts (which is moulded as part of the Dec Fork) were cracked, hence causing intemittent or non operation of the Dec. We cannot repair the Cracked Inserts; only replace the Entire Fork mount (only replaceable spares from Meades). Hence we quoted S$2,500 to replaced the 2 units Fork Mounts.
for VJC.

Jia Wei also told me of their club interest in astro imaging and we felt that their existing C8 will do a better job. However their old C8 had a basic vixen mount w/o drive & some other mechanical faults. I suggested upgrading their existing Vixen mount with the Meade LXD55 Goto mount. One C8 on a good EQ Goto mount will serve their current purpose better than 2 Goto EC-125.

Since VJC Astro Club has budget constraint, I proposed to trade-in their 2 units EC-125 for the Meade modified LXD55 for their C8 with a small top up.

I quoted them S$ 2,800 for the modified LXD55(quite similar to the one I put up for Sales here recently at a loss for about S$ 1450) and a Trade-in value of S$ 2,300 for 2 of the EC-125. This is commercial proposal and hence it is up to the school to decide if it is viable one. (although not always the lowest cost option)

Anyone here want to take up the offer to buy these 2 units EC-125 ?
How much are you willing to pay ?

That's much for the clarification.

[weedee]

Thank you for all of your advice, though I'm sorry I did not realise that I'm not supposed to openly discuss it here. I had no idea where to ask for help so I thought this was the best channel.

My teacher has already went on to get the school's approval, so we are now waiting for the results.