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So I just spent a couple of hours searching back for all the threads relating to the TT2. I haven’t included all the “I’ve just bought” or “I’m selling” threads unless they contain useful information or good photos. I didn’t realise exactly how much I’ve waffled on about it over the last ten years either!
Svend’s setup and arm journey:
http://theartofsound.net/forum/showt...ecommendations
Armboard issue:
http://theartofsound.net/forum/showt...-amp-Arm-Board
AlfaGTV nice pics:
http://theartofsound.net/forum/showt...-AlfaGTV-s-den
Svend’s else second thread:
http://theartofsound.net/forum/showt...he-small-stuff
For sale ad with good photos:
http://theartofsound.net/forum/showt...1-Heybrook-TT2
Setup query :
http://theartofsound.net/forum/showt...-platter-issue
PSU query:
http://theartofsound.net/forum/showt...2-Heybrook-PSU
PSU and suspension setup:
http://theartofsound.net/forum/showt...es-improvement
Transit screw and arm query:
http://theartofsound.net/forum/showt...-transit-screw
Setup and arms:
http://theartofsound.net/forum/showt...ok-TT2-project
Nice plinth Mods:
http://theartofsound.net/forum/showt...ok-TT2-journey
LP12/TT2 comparison with a bit of history :
http://theartofsound.net/forum/showt...arison-almost)
Mine arrives!
http://theartofsound.net/forum/showt...y-s-comin-home
Setup info and a bit about Heybrook pickup arms:
http://theartofsound.net/forum/showt...-do-with-a-TT2
Mystery TT1 thread!
http://theartofsound.net/forum/showt...r-Heybrook-TT1
Resto project and discussion about twin motors. Pics missing, sadly:
http://theartofsound.net/forum/showt...9-Heybrook-TT2
Mainly for Shane's benefit from "the internet remembers but often gets things wrong" department the following page is of interest.
http://www.deadwaxcafe.com/aa/archive.asp
It contains some discussion from the Analogue Addicts mail list contained in 9 zip files. The 3rd zip file in the list contains discussion from 1996 comparing the TT2 with another well known turntable. It contains the rather folksy paragraph that triggered the Heybrook was a Scottish company factoid that I know left Shane perplexed when he first saw it. Clearly a part of his life of which he has no recollection.
Indeed! This quote always amused me, and I never did find out who it was that was supposed to be saying it. Not only did it imply that Heybrook were in Scotland rather than Devon, it also gave the impression that the place was teeming with earnest young graduate engineers sweating over drawing boards and slide rules. It’s true that we did have a drawing board in the office and we did actually use it once or twice, but in all the time I was there I don’t think I met a graduate of any sort unless Stuart had a degree! There were never more than ten employees anyway.
how about some info shane on your design thoughts such as how you set about designing it,what were you core 'must haves' etc, were there prototypes and if so what did design changes did you make from them to the finished tt?
I started s reply to this but it seems to be rivalling war and peace for length at the moment. Probably tomorrow night....
I think I’ve covered a lot of this before so forgive me if it’s a bit familiar, but it seems like a good idea to revisit it for this thread.
It wasn’t as if I sat down one day and thought “I’m going to design a suspended subchassis turntable with an emphasis on rigidity and ease of setup”!
It started when I was working in a hifi shop. In the early seventies having just left school, this was a frustrating occupation. There you are surrounded by all this wonderful equipment costing hundreds of pounds, but on twelve quid a week you don’t get much chance to take any of it home. I did manage to get hold of a nice little amp (an EMI Stereoscope 555) that was taken in part exchange, and I got hold of some half decent speakers from somewhere but I figured the only way to get a decent turntable was to put it together myself. At this point there was no suggestion that it would ever become a manufactured product. Heybrook didn’t appear on the scene for a good five years afterwards.
it’s all a bit hazy now, but I remember I got hold of an ERA 3033 which had met with some sort of accident. This was a rather strange French belt drive that had all the basic ingredients, ie alloy platter and sub-platter, a rather spindly bearing and a 24 pole synchronous motor.
Spending my days selling Duals, Lencos and later on Linns and Regas, I had a sort of an idea of what way I wanted to go. I thought that having plenty of mass to absorb vibration would be a good idea, but I also liked the idea of spring suspension to block external vibration. I went up a couple of blind alleys including trying to cast a complete concrete plinth
(hopelessly impractical) and hanging a suspended chassis made of dexion speed frame off three Morris 1100 throttle return springs inside a Victorian commode. That sort of worked but was a bit floppy. It was fitted with a Transcriptors Fluid arm that came my way, and worked ok as long as nobody in the room moved whilst it was playing. I ended up making a simple Rega copy with a couple of sheets of chipboard glued together with the ERA bits and the Fluid arm, but I now had a better idea of what I’d do if I got the chance to develop it.
After the hifi shop went bust, I briefly had a job with a local car repair shop. Going off topic a bit here, it was run by a genius mechanic by the name of Ed Jago, and what he didn’t know about tuning Minis wasn’t worth knowing. He had served his apprenticeship under Daniel Richmond at Downton Engineering in Salisbury who did all the development of the Mini Cooper and Cooper S for BMC. In his group of apprentices were Patrick Longman and Jan Odor who both became major figures in the British motor tuning industry. Another of the group was one Julian Vereker who went on to quite a different future. Small world...
One of Ed’s many talents was welding, and he opened my eyes to the possibilities of steel fabrication. I can’t remember what it was that I watched him putting together, but it was made from 2” x 1” rectangular steel tube with 1/8” wall thickness. That looked like useful stuff.
Back at the hifi shop, one of my colleagues was an old school friend, Peter Comeau. Being a bit more savvy than me he’d seen the writing on the wall and left about a year before the shop went bust, going off to make a name for himself as a hifi journalist. Like myself, he enjoyed tinkering and exploring possibilities, but his main area of interest was loudspeakers. He’d already helped the shop owner to put together some prototype speakers with an eye to expanding a spinoff business from the shop that ran a record cleaning machine, and I think he learned a lot about driver selection and basic crossover design in the process. The spinoff business was called JPW, but when that became a fully fledged manufacturer years later, Peter had nothing to do with it.
Instead, he got together with one of our customers who had become a good friend, and between then they created a nice little two way speaker with a friction loaded reflex port and some unusual crossover ideas that gave it particularly good imaging and phase coherence abilities, both of which were pretty unusual characteristics in the late 70s. Once they were confident that they had a viable product, they started up a company to manufacture it, and thus the Heybrook HB2 was born. A month or so on I joined them, assembling crossover boards and building speakers. Over the next two years the HB3 and HB1 were developed and the company became pretty successful. Peter and Stuart had been aware of what I’d been doing with turntables and suggested that I might like to put some of my ideas together, so I guess at that point I did start to sit down and think about a complete concept. I started off with the idea of a massive fabricated steel chassis. It was never going to be anything other than belt drive, since direct drive was pretty much derided at the time in the UK, and idlers had largely fallen out of favour because they were reputed to rumble. And anyway, developing either of those would have been way beyond our reach. That immediately meant that the platter would be in two parts, following the pattern of Linn, Thorens and originally AR. It was just the obvious way to do things. The other thing that I thought was a good thing to do was to give the whole thing a really solid foundation, and at the same time to eliminate voids in the plinth that could act as resonant cavities. I wasn’t certain that this was a significant problem, but a number of people had raised it as a possible issue, and it made a lot of sense to me, so I put together a block made from four layers of chipboard, with the bottom three layers cut out to house the chassis and a solid top layer for the bearing to poke through and to hang the suspension off. I spent a while trying to work out how best to hang the chassis off the top plate and realised that if you take a 6mm bolt and force it through a 5.5 mm hole in a piece of 18mm chipboard you get a pretty solid anchor. The additional benefit of being able to adjust the suspension from above wasn’t the primary objective, but a useful benefit that became one of the defining features of the TT2.
At this point, frustratingly,!can’t remember what platter and bearing I used. It can’t have been the ERA components because that subplatter was about 50mm thick and would have needed a hole in the top plate about 100mm diameter. I can only assume that I must have borrowed something suitable. Equally, I don’t know what motor i used but I do remember the belt was pinched from a Philips cassette deck! Suffice it to say that the cobbled up prototype that resulted was sufficiently good for Peter and Stuart to allow me to sit down to plan and draw the whole thing properly. We never built any more prototypes. We just went on what looked and felt right.
At this point we started to talk to a couple of blokes who ran a little precision engineering business from a barn across the road from Peter’s house. I think it’s fair to say that without them we never would have been able to produce a viable product. Take for example the main bearing and spindle. I knew what I wanted to achieve here, and I drew up a simple design which featured a 10mm steel shaft in a bearing sleeve made from 20mm hex brass bar stock with a 10mm hole bored through. This would then have a brass plug pressed into one end and a 10mm ball dropped in to provide the point bearing. Johnny and Dave looked at this and pointed out that if I wanted a precision ground 10mm shaft, they’d need to start with 12mm bar stock and grind off 2mm, which would be a long and wasteful process. If however I specified the shaft at 9.95mm, they could use 10mm stock and just grind of .05mm to achieve the surface needed. Obvious really, but if you don’t know, you don’t know. They also came with a process for manufacturing the bearing sleeve which I think is responsible for the whole quality of the TT2 performance. Instead of simply boring the brass bar stock out to 10mm, they bored it slightly undersize and then pressed a highly polished carbide ball of exactly the correct size to achieve the clearance needed down the bore. That gave a mirror finish to the bore whose accuracy was simply dependent on the accuracy of the ball. Since only one carbide ball was required, that could be very highly specified. Suffice it to say, the first sample they came up with was everything we could have wanted.
They also undertook to fabricate and powder coat the chassis, machine sub platters from 120mm ally bar stock, make up and powder coat the motor mounting plates, machine the motor pulleys and machine the raw platter castings which Peter procured from a foundry in North Devon to my drawings. Altogether very satisfactory.
The plinth and armboard drawings went out to Greaves of Sheffield who made the HB3 cabs for us. Again, they came back with exactly what we wanted, and all that was left was to procure the minor components such as springs and spring mountings, and the motor. That again was a simple choice. The Philips/Airpax/Premotec motor was pretty much the default choice at the time. Why reinvent the wheel?
After the first rough prototype was made and the design was drawn up in detail, there were no major changes made until the change to the cast alloy chassis about two years later. There were a couple of hiccups with the casting quality of the first batches of platters but other than that it worked pretty much out of the box.
a great read,cheers for taking the time to write it.
would i be right in saying that the hiccups in the platters resulting in them being sprayed black?
You would indeed!
Here are some images of a completely and beautifully rebuilt TT2 for sale a few years ago on CAM:
http://img.canuckaudiomart.com/uploa...-turntable.jpg
http://img.canuckaudiomart.com/uploa...-turntable.jpg
http://img.canuckaudiomart.com/uploa...-turntable.jpg
http://img.canuckaudiomart.com/uploa...-turntable.jpg
http://img.canuckaudiomart.com/uploa...-turntable.jpg
A description of the rebuild is there if you click "Return to Ad".
He did a wonderful job. It looks stunning, and I'll bet it sounds outstanding.
Edit: here is a full description, with pictures, of his rebuild process: https://www.canuckaudiomart.com/foru...ic.php?t=42895
Shane, close your eyes when he gets to the part about taking the saw to the original plinth :eek: