Garrard 301 restoration project

[Wakefield Turntables]

Hi Charlie,

It's bamboo, best and cheapest alternative to Panzerholz (which would be my first choice).

[Wakefield Turntables]

The Garrard Restoration Project Pt CII - Return of the three Amigo's.

Just a short one tonight. The Garrard plinth has been slowly simmering away in the garage. I work on the plinth mostly of weekends when I've not done a 10-11 hour day at work. I do not want to make silly errors. The top plate of the plinth is 95% finished I just have a little material to remove from the third tonearm and all should be good. So far both the 3012 and the SME 3009 which houses the Ortofon MONO SPU work perfectly and they are silent with no hum. My experiments with earthing leads have worked well. The alignment of all three tonearms works well now and records play perfectly on the MONO tonearm. Alignment with the second and third tonearms has always been problematic and the mounting distance was out by several mm's meaning that records didn't play properly and sometimes skipped. The problems with the second and third tonearms have been solved. I purchased a Vernier caliper with accuracy upto 0.01mm which is perfectly fine for mounting distances of old SME tomearms. The 3009's have been mounted at 214.5mm and the 3012 at 294.1mm. Weirdly everything seems to work.
The second 3009 just needs to be tested to make sure it plays records properly and the earthing produces a silent background.
The plinth should come together fairly quickly now that the top plate has been finished. It's still probably going to be several weeks before this is full finished.



Stay tuned.......

[Barry]

Shaping up nicely there Andrew.

Given the depth of the spacers for each arm base, you have to choose the vertical entry connector version for all of the SME arms. Given their depth, I think those spacers would look good if painted black, but that's just my opinion.

One thing that would annoy me is the way the grain pattern of the top plate of your plinth, gives the impression that the chassis of the 301 is 'crooked' with respect to the edges of the plinth.

[Wakefield Turntables]

Barry. I just chucked the deck in, it's not properly mounted. It was more just to get a quick shot of how the 301 looks.

[Barry]

Ah! - I did wonder, as the front edge if the deck didn't look parallel to the front edge of the plinth, regardless of the pattern of the veneer. Also none of the fixings had been fitted.

So far, so good.

[Wakefield Turntables]

The Garrard Restoration Project Pt CIII - Fine tweaks, upgrades and snagging!

Hello boys and girls it's been a month since I last wrote. It's Sunday, I have some Jazz spinning on the 301 and I'm now in official snag mode. I originally wanted to get the plinth finished for my birthday (which was last month) as a little pressie to myself but that didn't happen. I decided to make a new plinth for a number of reason but the main one was to try and learn new wood working skills and to try and improve the aesthetics of the old "Bauhaus" inspired older plinth that I was using. The old plinth was my very first attempt at making a plinth for the 301. My very first plinth was a birch ply thing that I bought from Moldovia over a decade ago and it worked ok but I had bigger plans for the 301. The second plinth for the 301 was the bamboo plinth which was glued and bolted together and then hacked up whenever I wanted to add something new to the 301.

The first bamboo plinth has some major problems that I did not like. The underside of the plinth has more holes than a swiss cheese from where I'd been trying to work out the mounting positions of the plinths feet. Here is a picture of the plinth before being full glued together. It's funny because you can see the old plinth underneath. The new plinth has been optimised to provide a better fit for the 301. I made slightly larger mounting holes for the mounting bolts so that I could have a little more flexibility of the mounting position of the 301.




I originally had plans to do lots of experiments with various wood treatment products but in the end I used a oil. Here's one of the failed products. I was going to veneer the outside of the plinth with a different wood but in the end I decided that I like the contrast of the plinth top over a black edge (and it was a lot cheaper) . I already had the paint sitting in the garage and does cover a multitude of sins.




Evolution of the 301 continues at a pace. I have always adored the MM carts from the 1970's and wanted a tonearm so that I could try some very best Shure, Grace, Stanton carts and the low mass version of the 3009 enabled me to do this. Presently I have a Shure V15 mk 3 strapped in place and I went full tilt and bought the very best stylii I could find, in this instance the JICO SAS/S.



This tonearm still needs some final tweaks. Firstly I need to decide the viscosity of the damping fluid in the damping trough and then I need to order a new pair of Yannis Tome IC's to fit, presently I have some Belden IC's that I made a few years ago doing duties. The Belden IC's work very well and make a very nice sound but I think I can do better, another problem for another day. I need to make sure that I've got the optimal bias weight as well as I currently have three sitting around!

Here's a quick picture of the finished plinth with all three arms mounted and the top of the plinth has been oiled many times.




I'm about 85% finished with the plinth and tweaking the 301. The ultimate plinth would be something made from Panzerholz or Permali, it's probably going to be Permali. I've gained a lot of confidence in making this new plinth and I now need to see how it performs and see if there are any design flaws which can be ironed out when I make version III. So, as ever, stay tuned....

Finally I intend to make a couple of mods to the EAR 834 clone phonostage. I found some very nice WBT RCA's which I will install at some point. I also need to optimise the Impedance loading for the Shure cartridge, I'm presently experimenting with values to find something that I'm really happy with and then I intend to make some very very nice loading plugs.