With the cartridge still in place fitted everything into the tone arm....had to do a little sanding to get a good fit, was very tight at first and I was afraid it may get stuck in the wrong position. When I was happy I applied some Aleenes Tacky Glue and pushed the whole thing home...

Did a quick check of the coils before the glue dries..........

Both channels look good......and I'm happy with the overall outcome so far, let the glue set and take stock of the remaining activites to close this one out 😕

Soldering the connections on the underside of the PCB

Then the connections on the top....I had wanted to retain the grey earth wire as I was a little nervous of soldering so close to the very fine wires to the rear of the PCB....however the wire fell off during the process so I had to run the black wire direct to the earth connection after all....

Re assembly underway......

Test run with a BM5000 and a couple of speakers.......all sounds great, everything functioning as it should. However.......I have noticed that the transformer is running quite warm...one might even say hot. Not smoking or smelling of baking shallac or melting insulation, just hot to the touch, I'm not sure how warm these normally get after an hour or so play....i'm wondering if this has something to do with the low secondary voltage to the neon....could there be a short in the windings? it seems likely.....will it become an issue? I really dont know at this time....any words of wisdom would be welcome as always.....

Craig

Further to the above....I have powered up the unit without switching it on.....and the transformer starts to warm up far more than I like, so with the unit off and the transformer heating up I'm suspecting the rogue secondary winding previously feeding the neon lamp, my question to the forum is this.....if i disconnect the top 44.5 ohm winding from the circuit (this is not now in use for the neon lamp) will this adversely affect the remaining windings which will still be subject to 230vac without the additional 44.5ohm windings connected? 

Craig wrote:

[...].if i disconnect the top 44.5 ohm winding from the circuit (this is not now in use for the neon lamp) will this adversely affect the remaining windings which will still be subject to 230vac without the additional 44.5ohm windings connected? 

😠 Oh yes it will!!
Whatever you do, do NOT touch the primary windings!!  They're fine the way they are.

Normally I wouldn't think that a partially shorted winding on the secondary side would be much of a problem, but depending on the way those wires are shorted there could be a small current flowing that causes the trafo to heat up unnecessarily.
To confirm that the rogue winding is the problem, please do following:

• a) measure the idle current on the primary side when the unit is in standby and when it is playing a record.
• b) make sure that the unused wires of that rogue winding are properly insulated and not accidentally shorted to some other parts of the unit
• c) disconnect one wire from every secondary winding and measure the primary current again after plugging in mains. (This is to make sure that there's no excess current drawn from the operational circuits in standby)

Once we have those readings we can think about next steps.

Sound advice Manfy.....I have confirmed that the unused secondary wiring is indeed fully insulated from the outside world, at least the part of the wires not encapsulated in resin is.

First pic is across one of the fuses in the primary windings with the unit in Standby......