Carbon

Cut up some bicycle tire inner tube, folded and fitted over each eyepiece.

My ES 82*/30mm is a grenade of an eyepiece and it sure weighs down on my 12” dob.    I use small sandbags and welders’ magnets to counterbalance.

Clear skies, observed for more than an hour between my Pentax spotting scope and the dob from my balcony.

For a small refractor you can also use a photo ball head in portrait mode.   With a good friction control knob it becomes a good alt-az mount with good fluid motion on both axis.

I use my Pentax 80 ED / 480mm spotting scope for wide field views, piggybacked on a CPC1100.   Pentax scopes accept standard 1.25” eyepieces, no adapters required.

My cpc1100 and 12” truss dob reside in my backyard obs.  Most all other astro  gear and accessories are kept in the house.

Shed or garage door handles work well with solid tube dobs.

We'd like to see it in action.

Well, I find that with a wide field eye piece I can place most objects within the field of view. I think what's more important than smaller increments of the degree circle is the absolute levelness of the base for consistent accuracy. I use a digital angle finder, place it on the base and spin the base 360 and adjust level. This is a bit more accurate method than using simple bubble levels for the base.

Or you can also use tiny labels like I did here to mark the degrees, except place them on the edge trim. There are a number of ways to do this.

As the outer edge of your base is black you could use one of the fine typing correction pens directly on the edge giving you white markings. I would suggest you over coat these when fully dry with a water based varnish/lacquer to seal and prevent chipping

...or use a label maker to apply numerals directly on the edge trim...

That above was my temporary solution until I decided to modify the base with a cutout and all. It actually worked out really well.

I think the easiest way to do this is to do what I did. First, separate the ground board from the base.

Use light colored electrical vinyl tape and apply over the edge trim. Don't stretch the tape when applying as it can contract, shifting your degree markings. Better if you used tape that didn't stretch at all.

You'll get a truer 360 degree divisions by taking the ground board and dividing it into 4 quadrants using a large carpenter's square and subsequently dividing those down to single degree divisions. I used a large protractor for this. The degree lines and numbers were drawn freehand using a fine permanent marker.

I want one to go around the circumference of my base, not sitting on top.

As on the outer edge trim of the ground board like this?:

Very elegant solution.