Wednesday, June 29, 2016

2016-06 Dual 1214 turntable restoration.

I want a better 78 player and found this turntable in a 3-N-1 stereo for $10. At that price it didn't matter if it was a no go. Looks like there had been some water damage and some missing bits but not too bad.
The motor did not spin freely which was a very bad sign so I worked on that first. The bottom of that armature was locked into the brass ball that acts as a bearing and guide. It was riveted into a support bracket that I destroyed before I realized I could possibly have disassembled it on account of one of the parts being so frozen I thought the two parts one.

(a bad first attempt that involved dental floss).

Hacked up a replacement bracket from a tip-top ice-cream lid and that worked really well .
Reassembled and the motor ran reliably and quietly but the speed selection, disk size and return were all faulty.

A good clean section by section, some small adjustments and I got all these working.
 
 Gave it a run (after using a magnifying glass and tweezers to straighten the stylus) and it sounded great. I had no suspicion that 78s could sound so good.
And I found the auto-change spindle lying inside the electronics in the case in the old 3 in 1 guts and that seems to work too.

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