Was sold as "Faulty" and this turned out to be an accurate description of the deck.....Perspex cover will require polishing to remove some quite deep scars, the stylus is bent double (has actually dropped off and is now hiding within the pile of my carpet) so the cartridge has been posted off to Alistair of Audio Originals for inspection....the coils measured up good at around 700 ohms so I'm optimistic it will turn out well. The seller advised the tone arm refuses to drop when a record is detected and this is indeed the case.

Manual operation of the tone arm lowering mechanism and the solenoid revealed it is in fact partially seized quite badly, this isn't a problem....and to be fair the rest of the machine looks in pretty good shape....certainly recoverable

Dismantled the tone arm lowering mechanism and found the pivot bushing under the circlip was the culprit, really was very tight and took a bit of persuasion to free off...….there are bits of wool inserted into the coils of the springs, I lifted one out before I realised what is was...thought it was just an accumulation of bits of fibre and dust,  but its clearly meant to be there....but to what end?

Craig

Craig wrote:

Dismantled the tone arm lowering mechanism and found the pivot bushing under the circlip was the culprit, really was very tight and took a bit of persuasion to free off...….there are bits of wool inserted into the coils of the springs, I lifted one out before I realised what is was...thought it was just an accumulation of bits of fibre and dust,  but its clearly meant to be there....but to what end?

Craig

I've always assumed it was a form of damping.

Don't forget the up down pivot on the arm. The arm will drop much smoother with a clean and lubricate. Not so easy to get to though.

Agreed Graham.....and while most of it is removed a drop of oil on the up/down pivot is worthwhile

Reassembled and given a test run.....arm lowers nice and gently, tone are tracks very nicely too.

Floats nicely below the knife edge too, rocks gently as the album spins

The guiding tabs have all took a beating, should be easy enough to straighten them out..

And the keypad shows signs of wear in the usual places......I know Rudi can recover these.