[doc612]

Hey all,
Doc here. I posted about this radio/phono last April. I've come a long way since then (I had just started trying to restore radios and had never held a solder gun) but I am having turntable issues. I bought a replacement cartridge from Ed Crockett and the phono worked fine- for a while. This morning I was playing Nat King Cole when he started to kind of- quaver? You know, up and down like the turntable wasn't running smoothly. And the more I fiddled with it, the worse it got until now it plays noticeably slower overall along with the still- wavering sound. What should I look for as the culprit? All I did so far was to spray WD40 into the motor and blow it out with a compressor, took the hard-rubber wheel off and cleaned and replaced it, and checked the wheel for runout with a micrometer. It doesn't appear to be out of round but that's sure what it sounds like. Actually the wheel looks to be in great shape. Pile on! I need advice.
Doc

[Radioroslyn]

Clean off the shaft coming out of the motor, drive wheel, inside edge of the platen, and anything rubber that you got WD-40 on. IPA should work to clean things off with.

Terry

[doc612]

Thanks Terry. Hey, everybody knows that was a joke about checking runout with a mike, right? Well, it sounded funnier in my head. Yeah, I cleaned up everything, The capstan, inside the platen, the wheel ( I took the wheel off before the WD40 spray), it still runs a little slow and has that darn drag on every rotation of the record. Also the turntable used to immediately start spinning at correct RPM but I noticed now it takes a turn or two to get up to speed. There's a spring that holds the wheel against the capstan; could that spring be stretched? It still works but I don't know what kind of tension it should have.
Doc