Hi Nick,?
One of the better qualities of SuperLube is the low viscosity even when extremely cold, additionally it won't run all over when hot and get on your clutch discs. This helps with smaller payloads in the saddle of Losmandy mounts which as Robert mentioned tends to prefer heavier payloads than lighter payloads due to the Losmandy mount design's relatively low sensitivity to imbalance even when well lubed and adjusted. This is often interpreted as stiction but is designed in, caused by the friction of the large disc surface area used in the Porter slip clutches. Being a visual observer I'd take the imbalance insensitivity to have the Porter slip clutches and finger tip PUSH-TO operation.
The best solution is to buy a bigger scope, but you could also just leave some imbalance in the mount to load it by keeping the worm pushing on the worm gear moving it uphill and not bouncing from one worm/worm gear face to the other worm/worm gear face. These mounts also do much better with less aggressive correction factors in PHD2, 0.5 guide rate and longer 2 second exposures slow the complete system's reactions to seeing so the mount does not cause a looping hysteresis problem by chasing the seeing trying to compensate dozens of times repeatedly when in the real world virtually no correction is needed.?
Fresh ABEC 5 or better bearings will improve your mount if they have never been changed, do not be tempted to lube them in anyway. The Belleville discs resolve a smaller issue by preloading the bearings and forcing the balls to move with the worm and they help with setting backlash by forcing the worm to remove axial worm backlash between the bearing blocks. Regarding the Oldham coupler, if you can replace it completely with a new one or the plastic center coupler part if you can find the right one (they wear out) any looseness is bad in this part, a drop of SuperLube won't hurt here either but only a tiny drop.?
A couple of other notes: you could swap the steel worm from the DEC to RA and see if that makes a difference but in my experience with the steel worms the fastest way to finding good PE performance on a classic Losmandy mount is to buy a new HP worm and install it in your RA. The HP worms typically reduce PE error by half of a steel worm on the same mount. I suggest ordering the HP worm now, do not change the bearings and add the Belleville discs until you have the HP worm to install on at least the RA axis before running your baseline tests. Do not adjust the mount in a warm house, leave the mount out in the cold several hours and only after the mount has fully cold acclimated do a worm backlash adjustment. These mounts when cold acclimated shrink a LOT and you can get lagging and stalls due to the loss of adequate backlash. In a warm room you will be temped to readjust out the now excessive amount of backlash - DON'T DO IT!??
Yes, find the baseline and use it to improve on. Make notes and if things go crazy go back to that setup and verify it works as you think it should before messing with it some more.?
Hope this helps!
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Chip Louie Chief Daydreamer Imagination Hardware?
? ?Astropheric Weather Forecast - South Pasadena, CA?
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Chip Louie