25" Newtonian Azimuth Roller Bearings

In January of 2005, a good friend of mine and I took on a project to design and build an Alt/Az telescope drive for his 25" reflector. The project went well and he has been using it for nearly a year. Recently, he started having problems with the AZ drive. He traced it down to the azimuth idler bearings between the underside of the rocker box and the ground board. His 25" is quite heavy, about 350 pounds. This weight was too much for the light duty aluminum panel on the underside of the rocker box and bearings that have been on the scope for a couple of years. He has removed the 1/16" aluminum bearing panel and replaced it with 1/8" stainless steel. This helped immensly, but the poor quality and small size of the bearings still weren't up to the task. I built him three new bearing carriers, each containing four 1603 sealed bearings. Hopefully this will be the end of his azimuth bearing problems for a while.