A new pier

I spent yesterday making sawdust and a new portable pier for the ETX. It's a bit wobbly but it works fine and I was able to try it out tonight. I saw Eps Lyr easily and Albireo was a pretty gold and blue pair, the blue partner noticeably dimmer. My new alignment scheme is working good. I set the Alt to 63.5 and scan for Polaris, then set Alt to 37.5 and do an easy alignment. I could probably just sync on Polaris and be pretty close. I've been using Vega but it's about to disappear over the top of the house. My view of the sky is pretty limited in my little dark 'observatory' behind the house. The andromeda galaxy was nice tonight. I was able to see about 12 other stars in the field with Eps Lyra centered. That means I was seeing down to about 7.5 mag at 7:38. By 9:30 it was much better. I was able to find the double cluster (NGC869 and 884) both manually and from a list of clusters in the autostar. It's not bad and I was able to make a rough sketch of the field stars that matched CdC with the horz axis swapped. The BIG DEAL tonight though was my experience with the dreaded 'cord wrap'. I was flipping back and forth between Cygnus and Cassiopeia and wondering why the ETX was getting lost. I'd center Deneb and goto Shedir and no bright star was in the field. I finally noticed that the cord was almost wrapped around the base of the ETX when pointing to Cas and the motors would pretty well shut down at that point. Clearing the cord put everything back in order again.