Once I located them, it was not a hard decision on which approach to take. Note that an SS2K retrofit of an EQ6 will definitely cost you well over $1000 USD - still higher than the cost of the EQ6 itself! The SS2K was the approach I was most seriously considering before finding a source of the LXD55 motors. It also seems to offer the most capability for the lowest price. The Skysensor 2000 retrofit seems to be gaining popularity recently. They all seemed very expensive, with most of them costing MORE than I paid for the EQ6! Some of these retrofits are available from the following companies: I came to the conclusion that only a completely different set of motors was going to fix the problem. No amount of adjusting of worm gear clearance, or "soft" mounting of the steppers helped. I tried several things to fix the stepper motor vibration issue. If someone has an EQ6 with this much PE, I'd strongly suggest that you return it to your dealer and get another one. Strangely, I've heard of some recent cases where people are getting results of 40 to 60 arc/seconds, or even worse! This could be a quality control issue that may not be that unusual for Chinese made mounts. Note: Other folks doing early testing of the PE on their EQ6 mounts got comparable results. Not bad - I can easy guide out that amount of error. Over a period of 8 minutes, the drift proved to be about 18 arc/sec P-P, with no sudden jumps. The total P-P error was verified by putting Saturn on the cross-hairs. By utilizing a special video monitor with a superimposed video cross-hair, I was able to accurately assess the PE of the mount in real time. My testing of periodic error was done using a small security video camera. That's what these big GEM's are for, right? If you are just going to use the scope visually, many people (myself included) find a Dobsonian much easier to setup and use. Lots of folks who buy the EQ6 have aspirations of doing Astrophotography with it. There may have been (and still be) a mechanical resonance issue cropping up here which only happens under certain conditions. Mounts loaded with heavier, or lighter scopes sometimes had no problems. Not everyone reported this vibration problem though. Turning off the drive made a noticeable difference in the quality of the images. Many owners were noticing vibration problems which compromised medium and high power planetary viewing. Unfortunately, it seems that the replacement stepper motor system wasn't quite perfect either. Rumor is that Synta had a problem with their servo motor design very early on, and all EQ6's were retrofitted with the stepper motor system before dealers actually sold many (if any) of them. The original EQ6 mounts were made with DC servo motors, but as I understand it, probably no western purchaser of an EQ6 ever got one of them. That weakness was the standard stepper motor drive system. The biggest weakness of the EQ6 became apparent the very first night I had it out. It's far better than the LXD55 mount that came with my Meade 8" Schmidt-Newtonian. I've had both a C9.25 and 8" LXD55 SNT OTA on the mount and it is SOLID. But the carrying capacity is quite obviously there. The first thing you notice is the weight. The worm shaft itself runs on small ball bearings, something the less expensive Chinese mounts also lack. Robust tapered roller bearings were used instead of the sloppy sleeve bushings I'd encountered in previous Chinese mounts. The machining tolerances were reasonably tight, and the motion of each axis felt very good (especially after the adjustments done during re-assembly). Although it obviously was not of the same calibre as the $2500 to $4000+ mounts mentioned above, it was far better than the sleeve bushing CG-5's and other Chinese mounts that I'd inspected. Very soon after receiving the EQ6, I totally dismantled it. This is not much less than what Orion is currently selling their version for. Shipping was another $90, bringing my total to about $785. In the fall of 2001, I decided to place an order for an EQ6 from TeleHoon in Canada. It was quite obvious that no cheap Chinese mount could come anywhere near the capability or refinement of those mounts, right? The folks who were pre-judging it were (again, not surprisingly) those who had already invested mega-bucks in well respected mounts from AstroPhysics, Losmandy, Takahashi, or William Optics. Not surprisingly, the hopefuls were folks who really couldn't afford one of the heavy-duty high end mounts on the market. Talk of it on various internet newsgroups and mailing lists were both hopeful and pessimistic. In the summer of 2001 a new mount from the Chinese manufacturer Synta, the Skywatcher EQ6, was making a relatively quiet debut. retrofitting the AutoStar and LXD55 servo motors to a Synta EQ6, or Orion Atlas mount AutoStar Powered EQ6 A high capacity GOTO mount on a budget.