[The_bluester (Paul)]

Thought I would add this in, I went out and made the experiment this morning. By dropping the altitude adjustment as low as it will go it does make the RA balance a lot easier to do. Raising the north side of the tripod to a scary position (Likely to over balance) makes it move as freely as the Dec does when putting the weights above the RA.

Not really practicable to do on my pier, it would take too much shimming of the pier plate, but dropping the altitude to 0 does make a significant difference by itself and would only add a minute or so to the balancing exercise to drop the alt to 0, balance the RA then raise the alt back to a known starting point for polar alignment.