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You can see a little bit of wear in the gears here where the gear teeth have become sharp,
so that indicates to me that this has had a fairly good working life during its original operation.
But it's not so worn out that it can't work any further.
You also see the tips of some of these teeth that have been knocked off through wear.
Alright, well, this is the drive mechanism, which allows the telescope to track objects through the night sky
so that people can take long-exposure photographs and make accurate readings.
And without this working properly the telescope will either move too fast or too slowly.
So what we need to do is actually have a bit of a look at this and see where and how it's damaged
and have a look at how much it's worn, because that will give us an indication of how much work
the telescope has done during its life, and see what we can do to preserve the remaining features.
In which case, we need to take it to pieces.
And someone did that before?
They've done it more than once before I suspect by some of the little bits of damage on the screw head and bits and pieces.
And they've also got paint in areas which should never have been painted.
So there's going to be a few interesting restoration features that we need to think about undoing.
The problem with some of these restorations is they can be very well intended
but they often include some fundamental mistakes about how the way things work, for instance,
Which cause further damage then. Look at that wheel for example. All the teeth are a bit damaged.
That looks not like only corrosion damage to me. It's not only corrosion.
I think that what they've done is during the reassembly they have the gears partially misaligned, which has meant,
it's much thinner than left and right ... not working on the right surface.
For instance, there should be a little bit more different backlash between those gears.
It's possible that they have this gear out of square.
Or it could be caused through the paint layer underneath as well.
Yes it could.
So I think what we need to do is take it to pieces and have a good look at exactly what's been done,
clean it and do a reassembly with the correct adjustments.