Retrofitting the tip-tilt mechanism on the RH200

When working on collimating and aligning my RH200 scope, I came across a post on the Officina Stellare forum where somebody from Officina Stellare talked about a new tip-tilt mechanism that makes it easier to align the imaging train. And that Officina Stellare sends upgrade kits free of charge to customers. Mine came in the mail this week and I installed it today:

For starters, the whole kit is a few washers and some screws:

After removing the focuser, the first thing to do is to remove the lock screws one by one

... and replace with the longer screws in the kit:

This by itself is a great help for any maintenance on the back of the scope. It holds the several washers in place that otherwise fall out of their holes and are a pain in the neck to keep in place when you put the backplate back on.

Once we have all 4 temp screws in place

... we can remove the backplate ...

... and the washers stay on the temp screws

The main part of the upgrade is to fit these special washers on the backplate.

They need to be hold in place with a little bit of glue. I found this tricky as glue doesn't hold well on the surface of the backplate We also put the same number of washers on the temp screws (always making sure that their tilt is changing).

Now, we do everything in reverse (mount the backplate, replace the temp screws with the lock screws)

And finally mount the focuser and camera back on

After I was done, I realized that there is a small gap between the back of the OTA and the backplate. When taking dusk/dawn flats I have to make sure to cover that gap!