A lot of dobsonian telescopes in this size range suffer from having azimuth motions (side to side) that are not as smooth as they could be. The easy fix was mentioned in Sky & Telescope magazine a few years ago. What you want to do is offload some of the weight from the bearing pads and place it near the center bolt. The solution S&T offered was to take some plastic milk jugs and cut out some large washers to place loosely over the center bolt. It's going to be trial and error to find the right amount to stack until your scope rotates smoothly. Remember that you want to lift the bearing pads off the base buy only a hairs width. You just want to lighten the load, not have the washers carry the load.

Another good solution was recently mentioned on the Astronomy.com forums. TrashAstronomer (John) had read that instead of the milk jug washers you could use old vinyl 33 1/3-rpm records. You have to drill out the center hole a bit larger to loosely fit over the center bolt. Same as above, you don't want to lift the bearing pads off the base. By the way... I told John in thanks for the tip that I would mention that you couldn't use jazz-fusion records for this (his favorite music). However this would be a perfect use for disco or top 40 records.

Here is another tip on smooting azimuth motions provided by Mike Salway, who is founder of the excellent IceInSpace.com community from Australia. He first tried the milk jug trick, but for him it didn't last, so he came up with another idea. The following is quoted word for word from Mikes web site, and used here with his permission. Thanks Mike!