How do you balance your EQ Mount

[Hans Tucker (Hans)]

So ..how do you balance your mount. I just picked an appropriate weight and moved it down the shaft until I achieved balance and this was around the mid point along the shaft which creates a high inertial moment arm.

I recently read an article written around balancing your mount for imaging that suggest you place a heavier counter-weight/s along the shaft closer to the head and a lighter weight that you can adjust further from the head to make finer adjustments and this setup produces a significantly reduced inertial moment arm. This setup apparently provides optimum guiding.

[Wilso]

I do pretty much the same , even though do mainly visual.
Add weights to the shaft keeping them as close as
to the mount as possible. I use a TAK EM200 which you can also retract the shaft into the mount (a bonus) Keeps everything nice and compact as well!

[h0ughy (David)]

I didn't until I watched a video from losmandy on mount balance. Does make sense now

[Startrek (Martin)]

Moving the counterweights up the shaft towards the mount to balance your rig does reduce the moment of inertia but it doesn’t necessarily mean you will notice an improvement in guiding error. Guiding is more dependent on other factors like atmospheric conditions (including humidity , wind, temperature, Jetstream , high cloud etc.. ) mechanical deficiencies in the mount and guiding equipment and settings.
I’ve experimented a few times with 3 x 5kg and 4 x 5kg counterweights up and down the shaft with good balance on my EQ6-R mount and didn’t notice any significant positive or negative knock on affects in guiding.
But yes reducing moment of inertia is a commonsense approach to assisting the overall guiding, so I adopt that measure by moving the counterweights towards the mount where possible whilst achieving good balance
Attached is my procedure to balance an EQ mount
Thanks for posting