Thanks all.
The egg shaped holes is what I was hoping to hear.
I think that if I can support the dish temporarily, I will take the motor/worm gear assembly completely off, because it has been hard to get grease in there, and it hasn't had a proper grease job for years. I'm not sure how or why, but it seems like mice or chipmunks like to build nests inside the plastic housing, and the sticks jam the gears too.
Back when I used an actuator on another dish, it was easy to support the dish, just using a short length of chain, sort of replacing the actuator, but this darn dish swings high above the rotation axis, and since I also have the darn spinclination type dish, it isn't really good to support it via a point on the dish itself, but will probably have to somehow block the movement of the mount itself.
I used to have a big metal bar bolted onto the mount, to which I connected a big log as a counter-weight on a chain also connected to a nearby flexible pine tree limb, both of which gave me a bit of pull to help the motor pull the thing up from it's low point. Perhaps I could put that back on, and run a tight chain to a tree to hold the dish up.
I'm really wishing that I had bought an actuator mount instead of this thing. When I first got it, I wanted the H-H because I had visions of seeing all the sats over the atlantic, and initially I had LOS from 135W thru somewhere around 20W, but now the trees have grown so much that I can only see from ~125 to ~50W, and I could do that with an actuator, and an actuator would have been MUCH easier to service, and is much better for getting the dish down and back from near the horizon. Ie actuators have best mechanical advantage near horizon and have problems near flop point, while H-H have problems down low near horizon, and are fine high in the arc.