One More Reason to Like the Internet

During the Summer of '10 I managed to break my CGEM mount when a Celestron power supply went wacko and fed it a voltage that was too high. While trying to pin down the problem I also hooked my CG5-GT to the bad supply. That mount also died. The little red LED didn't light, the hand control stayed dark.

Ouch.

The CGEM was new and still in warrantee, so Celestron fixed it. It has worked beautifully since returned, and I highly recommend the mount to anyone seeking something that can gracefully carry up to 30 pounds of gear. The CG5 languished, however, since it was not needed. Frankly, I admit I was not in a hurry to get it open and find that it was dead; which would mean that its resale value had probably fallen from $400 to $100. Not to mention that it was relatively useless.

I wanted this mount back in working order either to sell it or to use it at star parties as a platform for wide-field DSLR imaging of constellations.

Today I decided to open up the seemingly deceased patient, hoping that inside lurked a fuse or some component that could be replaced easily. No such luck; I found that the CG5's brains are on two small circuit boards devoid of fuses. Nothing seemed to be out of normal in appearance, so it looked like a case of blown electronics.

A google search ("repair CG5") turned up a 3rd party repair service that had gone out of business last December. There were also threads that reported dead mounts because of loss of contact in the center pin of the power socket. I dutifully widened the split center prong but nothing changed.

Another commonly reported problem was the failure of the on/off switch, which was said to go bad often in CG5s. Cleaning or bypassing the switch was said to sometimes restore function. I took out a jumper cable and easily bypassed the switch, hooked up the power supply, and the mount lived! The handset fired up, ready to do an alignment.

I popped the top off the switch and inspected it.  The contacts were a little dirty; there was the slightest hint of arcing damage by on the business end of the tiny, see-saw like strip of metal in the switch. I scraped it all clean, put it back together and the switch now works.

All thanks go to the Internet, and the people who shared their solution for a specific problem. They saved my mount!