11/09/2013

Tenerife emergency maintenance update - September 2013

We arrived on site to make emergency repairs to the system on the 7th of September, since that date we have been working hard to bring the system back on line.


On the first day we replaced the damaged dome drive wheel and its inner tube, this was the main fault preventing operation of the system. Whilst we had the dome Az drive apart we took the opportunity to drain and replace the oil in the drive gearbox. On the summer maintenance trip we had noticed some signs of an oil leak on a seal at the bottom of the gearbox; we have cleaned and reseated these seals and there appear to be no signs of the leak returning.

Before leaving the UK we had seen signs of a failure within the USB system used by the cameras. We brought spare USB system parts with us for the maintenance trip, these have allowed us to replace the failing components. Our investigations of the problem revealed a failed USB hub and power supply. Sadly these are one of the few parts of the system which we cannot build redundancy in to.

Since completing the urgent maintenance work we have turned our attention to resolving the pointing and tracking issues which have plagued our imaging over the summer months. It is too early to be sure if we have made progress.. but the amount of work we've done means it will justify a blog post just about that work.

1 comment:

  1. My photographs have been coming out perfect so far the last few days so everything looks good at this end. Thanks!

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