Just before Christmas my Thorens TD 125 MK 11 suddenly stopped turning. I was fearing the worst and that there would be a problem with the generator board or a blown motor. One of my worst fears was that a light bulb on the board NLA was blown. This bulb has low resistance at stating and increases motor torque for starting. The bulb heats up and increases in resistance and rebalances the Wien Bridge for running. Obviously the spec on that bulb is crucial. Anyhow after opening the unit up that was the first thing I checked. It was fine.
Then I noticed one of the wires from the power transformer secondary had come off the generator board.
It was not a dry joint, the solder was fine. The last inch and a half of the wire was rotten and powdery. I have no idea why. There was no corrosion round the solder. So I soldered it back onto the board after getting back to bright braided copper. The turntable started right up. The same thing had happened to the wire linking the fixed and floating chassis. So I hope I don't get more of this.
One more bit of good news is I found that this is one of the last production of these turntables as the generator is the simpler one with the 8 pin ICs rather then the 14 pin. That is a better generator and only a few late production units have these.
This is the turntable.
The SME series III arm had to come off. I had to remove a couple of cabinet panels. One slides out the rear two screws.
As with a lot of good vintage gear the unit is beautifully made, and so disassembling and reassembly was not at all difficult. I checked and serviced all the switches while it was apart.
The SME arms are pure joy. The founder of SME Alistair Robertson-Ailman was just a stickler for beautiful and elegant design. He also assumed the customer was not an idiot and the arms came with a set of tools to adjust and fully service the arms. It is this sort of attitude that makes me just love good vintage gear.
Anyhow I can now get back to spinning vinyl by the fire, which I'm doing now.
