Balancing the LX90

[Piet Le Roux]

I am working towards getting into AP with my 8" LX90ACF in 2020 and one of the steps to making this happen is getting it balanced . There is a weight kit available but the price is a bit high, if you can get one. The other problem is that with the Meade weight kit you cannot use a flexible wrap around dew shield you have to use the Meade one that attaches with screws, also very expensive and hard to get. My answer to the problem is to attache a piece of heavy duty stick on velcro to the OTA and then got a collection of stick-on lead weights, the type that they use at tire shops to balance wheels, the 50 gram weights are for trucks, I had to experiment to find the best place to mount them and I found the Meade OTA to be heavier on the focuser side and not the spotting scope side as I had thought. So I had to mount them off centre, something the weight kit cannot do! With the velcro it is easy to attach and to remove the weights again. I use some of the same weights on the dew shield when I attache it.

It took about 690 grams to balance it with the camera mounted.

[JayTee]

Hi Piet,

I followed the directions for balancing my CPC1100 found on the Starizona website. Go here and scroll down to Balancing a Fork-Mounted Telescope: https://starizona.com/tutorial/balancing-for-imaging/

Cheers,
JT

[Piet Le Roux]

Thanks for the link JayTee. I have achieved all that they have recommended and more. I must say the double weight kit from Celestron is an improvement over the single one from Meade but they are both lacking in the near horizontal position when you are facing your polar home position. The Meade is definitely heavy on the focuser side and if you loosen the Ra clutch, in this position, it rotated. My goal was to get it to be balanced in all possible positions and I think I have achieved that at very low costs. The advantage of using velcro and lead weights is that you could attache them anywhere that you need to without damaging your OTA.

[Lady Fraktor]

An interesting modification, I hope it works well for you.