Deck life

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So, today my good friend John headed over, a day of chilling and chatting was planned (at least in my head) and that’s what occurred. John showed me some of his latest projects which reminded me why I used to love dinking with computers and electronics, and also prompted me to think more about the finishing touches for the Minor which will, when it’s electrically powered, need some information displays…

We also had a dink with the official Dead Bug Jumping record deck.

Well, look who came back to life...

I somewhat prematurely (it appears) declared it working this morning. But further playing with it revealed that it wasn’t working well at all. The drive was slipping too much – but we took it apart, and spent some time cleaning the drive mechanism and the underside of the platter. Reassembly demonstrated that it wasn’t happy still – and then John noticed that the spindle (which turns in a bearing of some sort) was incredibly stiff. The manual declares that this is a self-lubricating system requiring no further lubrication. This may have been true in 1966, but today it was a system of very dry old oil that had turned into a substance not unlike glue.

I need to pick up some sewing machine oil, clearly, but the solution applied for the minute was to mix proper penetrating oil (Plus Gas) and engine oil (10W40). After a little while the bearing freed up, and the turntable now starts promptly and turns smoothly.

That’s not the only problem with the deck though. We also tackled the speed adjustment, using the neon light off an extension lead to provide the 50Hz flicker (I am in awe of John’s MacGyver tendancy). Unfortunately, the motor seems to be running a little tiny bit fast, but 33 ⅓ rpm is fine. 45rpm is okay… 78 rpm is a smidge fast, and I can’t quite get the adjuster down as far as it needs to go. 16 rpm is an unknown quantity, because the stroboscopic disk doesn’t include a 16 rpm adjuster.

So, it’s now in a state were getting a cartridge is worthwhile. However, the tone arm is not happy. Clearly there was a design flaw in the headshell, where over time the contacts got dirty and the deck got noisy… and soldering’s happened and the cartridge mount’s got deformed, and then wires have been soldered to replace broken connectors, and we’ve ended up with this:

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So there’re some wires that need replacing, but I need to decide on a cartridge first…

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Also, the deck has no earth (ground) at all. So that also needs fixing. Sadly, the preamp doesn’t have a ground either, so I’m going to have great fun creating an earth tag on the amp and a run from the deck to ground… Audiophiles would be horrified :)

KateWE

Kate's a human mostly built out of spite and overcoming transphobia-racism-and-other-bullshit. Although increasingly right-wing bigots would say otherwise. So she's either a human or a lizard in disguise sent to destroy all of humanity. Either way, it's all good.