As is typical for me, I decided to go the cheapest route first. I happened to have a gallon of milk that I had finished earlier that morning, so quickly cut out a couple of donuts and installed them on top of my bearing ring. Little, if any, improvement. So I put them underneath the bearing ring instead... Still not much improvement.
I was intrigued by the idea of using a lazy susan bearing and had already put it on my shopping list as the next thing to try when I came across a video where a guy just installed some furniture sliders between the ground board and the rocker box baseboard. He had the exact same bearing mechanism as my
I purchased 2 4-packs for $5 each and planned originally to just use 6 of them, but then had the brilliant idea that the 8 spokes on my bearing ring would be perfect for showing me exactly where to place the pads.
You can tell where the ground board has rubbed a bit with the rocker box baseboard. The furniture sliders came with about 1/4 inch of adhesive padding, so the rocker box sits slightly higher and doesn't touch the original bearing ring assembly at all. I just left it attached because I didn't know what else to do with it.
The thumbscrew holding the rocker box to the ground board had plenty of length, so I was able to reuse it.
So, how did it work out? Amazing! There's still some friction (the bottom of the rocker box baseboard is still the original paint/coating), but it's just the right amount. I ran the telescope through its paces last night and even set up in a sloped part of the driveway to see how well it could handle things when it wasn't quite level. The motion is very smooth. I won't say buttery-smooth, because you can't just give the base a spin and watch it go round and round ... as soon as you let go of it, motion stops, but will begin moving again with just a very small amount of force.
I decided to give it a bit more of a test. Dobson's Hole. M57 and M13 were both pretty close to Zenith, so I hunted them down. It was easy enough to get them to show up in the finder, but how easy would it be to get them centered on the target, where you have to move the telescope back and forth along both axes in order to get it to the sweet spot?
As it turned out, it was pretty easy. I let out an audible giggle as M13 slid right into the center of my crosshair and showed up in my eyepiece. As it slowly drifted out of view, I gave the scope a gentle nudge and it snapped right back into the center of the field again. Dobson's Hole was now just a minor inconvenience.
I can't say whether or not this will work for anyone else, but it gave new life to a