Vinyl Revival

Posted on 2012-07-25 by Ken

One thing that has been on my to-do list for far too long is to clean up my turntable so I can start listening to and ripping vinyl again. It’s embarrassing to admit how long I’ve been putting it off… I think I noticed it being erratic two years ago, bought the DeoxIT stuff I needed to fix it a year later, and then sat on it until today. Anyways, it’s done at last! Here’s how…

Start with a Technics SL-1500 in good condition save for the fact that it will vacillate wildly between making your favorite musicians sound like they’ve been hit on the head a few times too many, and been breathing helium.

Also have a good electronic switch cleaner and lubricant ready. I used Caig Labs DeoxIT Fader formula for the switches and pots, and DeoxIT Gold for the connections between the board with the trim switches and the speed controller and motor board.

Set it down on your work surface. First thing you’ll need to do is remove the platter. For this model it’s held in place by a magnet, so you can just grasp it by the two holes uncovered by removing the slip mat and pull it straight up and off the motor.

Next, flip it over and remove the bottom case. You’ll want to loosen all the phillips screws on the bottom, keeping track of where the long and short ones came from, or just leaving them in their holes and lifting them out with the casing.

Once you’ve got it open you’ll see this:

We have three targets for cleaning and lubrication here. In the lower left is the main speed selector and power switch. Hitting it with the chemicals should be easy since the mechanism is completely exposed. I recommend taking the board loose so you can drip the lubricant down in between the discs that make up the switch and use gravity to your advantage.

Next are the two speed adjustment potentiometers. You’ll wanna take the plate these are mounted to loose to give you better access to spray stuff in since as installed they’re hard to get at. Make sure to twist these lock to lock several times at each stage to circulate the cleaner well and get rid of built up gunk on the contacts.

Also, make sure to check that once you’ve screwed the plate with the potentiometers back in place that you can reinstall the knobs that go on them and turn them freely. There was enough play in the fitment on my turntable that on my first go the knobs would rub against the sunken area of the top case they fit into and I had to take everything back apart to adjust and get them moving freely.

Finally, you’ll want to take the big circuit board in the middle loose and take care of the two trim switches on it.

The trim switches are the two white knobs you can see in the below picture. Make sure to mark their initial position as if they are moved too far off the main adjustment knobs will not have the right range to adjust the speed of the turntable into a useable setting.

I also lubricated the motor using some Triflow sewing machine oil I had for *another* project I’ve been sitting on for too damn long (a seafoam green Singer 338). There’s a special Technics-approved oil for the purpose but I figured this stuff would work well enough. Can’t be any worse than not being oiled period for 20 years.

Once you’ve reinstalled that board, stitch everything back together, hook things back up, and enjoy the fruits of your labor.

Mad props to the author of Thrift Store Record Report for their awesome guide (http://recordreport.blogspot.com/2011/05/fixing-unstable-turntable-speed.html) to the SL-1300 that helped reassure me I wasn’t Doin’ It Wrong. Thanks also due to The Vinyl Engine for having the manual for my turntable available online (http://www.vinylengine.com/library/technics/sl-1500.shtml).

Find of the Week

Posted on 2012-04-18 by Ken

Sometimes, all the Goodwill has in stock is in the tier of hideous “collectible” figurines with menacing expressions and missing limbs. At others, their appraisers have gotten ambitious, and there is a mountain of cool stuff in stock, but only because it is priced beyond the limits of even the harshest hipster markup. Fairly regularly though, there’s something neat among the picture puzzles and church retreat souvenir tumbler glasses.

Today I found gold lying on the test bench next to a bunch of TVs and old stereo components:

It’s a Craig model 1605 clock radio, manufactured by the Sanyo Electric Company.

The clock function doesn’t work, which is typical. Usually the motor is burned out or the gear train is damaged somehow. I’ve only run into a few that have worked when I tested them in the store, and of those the one that stayed running the longest lasted under a year.

It’s a very cool looking unit, and while the clock doesn’t work all the other functions do, and it has an output for external speakers. I’m going to use it as an FM tuner for my stereo for now.

I’ve been collecting old flip digit clocks for a while now since they’re still common enough that broken ones are cheap even for the rarer designs. What I’d like to do in the future is replace the fragile motor and gear train with a computer controlled servo to actuate the flip digit display. I’d love to be able to use one of them daily and not have to worry about when it will inevitably fail and leave me late for work or something.

I also found this neat old thing at Free Geek for two bucks. I bought it mostly for the old school Apple logo sticker on top but I’ll probably use it as a switch box for some stuff in the garage. I remember having something similar for my Apple IIE at some point, way back when.

History in The Bins

Posted on 2012-03-22 by Ken

So today I decided to take a trip out to the Goodwill Bins. It’s a pain in the ass to get to, so I don’t visit that often, but when I do I hope for the kind of stuff I found today. A lot of the regulars are there to scrape stuff to resell, which I can respect. But that’s not my goal when I hit up those blue plastic troughs. I’m often after the occasionally bizzare, sometimes personal, and always interesting documents that are only brought to light when someone donates an entire household’s worth of accumulated junk to one of the largest charitable thrift store chains in existence.

Amidst the easily dismissed and disturbingly sticky mass of trash that is one of the toy bins, I found a cache of such things. The tattered stack of newspaper clippings and heavily creased newsletters seemed to be part of a larger collection of ephemera, but in all my scouring of the surrounding bins I found nothing similar. What I did take home was three issues of “The Maintaineer”, a newsletter put together by members of the 10th Armored division maintenance battalion in Georgia, dating to the summer of 1942. With the newsletters were a few clippings from the Seattle Times dated early in 1945, all concerning action by the 10th in Bastogne, Belgium. The last object was a Japanese issued Phillipine ten centavos note, with holes punched in it which seem to be typical of notes given to soldiers as souveneirs after the end of the war.

I’ve scanned the Maintaineer issues, which can be found linked below. They’re an interesting snapshot of a very different time and place.
Volume 1, Number 1 (August 17th, 1942)
Volume 1, Number 3 (August 22nd, 1942)
Volume 1, Number 4 (September 5th, 1942)

Raster Burn

Category Archives: Old Things

Vinyl Revival

Find of the Week

History in The Bins