April 30, 2024

Needle Cleaning Day

I’ve been playing catch-up what with finally getting the SMC1 working. I finished the SMC3 mechanism and installed it in the SMC1. Lo and behold it picked up A/B sides one after the other as it is supposed to. As a reminder the other mech would not play both sides of the same record. Now the juke will with the SMC3 mechanism so I confirmed that the problem was indeed in the mechanism. The beauty of spare parts. And then I proceeded to overthink the problem as I usually do. It’s a good way to learn as I pored over schematics, troubleshooting guides, broke out the meter, ohmed every wire to death…..

I found nothing and finally turned back to the vertical stack of switches. I compared them with the ones on the SMC3 mech and looked at the adjustments. The bottom pair, 1M1 and 1M2, reverse the motor when going from left to right side play when both sides of the same record are selected. The motor was reversing before the mechanism could mechanically switch the tonearm assembly to the right side. It was a matter of adjusting them again, using the SMC3 mechanism as a guide. I had done it according to the book and it just wouldn’t work. The gap needed to be a lot bigger than what Seeburg says.

Now I have a working SMC1 and am at the point of testing. I go out every day and play several records looking for problems to crop up. The ones that did lately are like the tone arm would not land in the play-in space. No matter where I put the Pickup 1 adjustment the tonearm was being jerked forward a bit landing in the music. I had to perform the rest of the Pickup Adjustments 2 through 5 to fix that and then back to 1 to get a good landing spot. Today, most of the time the record clamp won’t clamp flat against the record. When it does this it causes the record to wobble and you can definitely hear a warble. A bad warble that sounds like the speed is off. I did the adjustments for it several times. Most people want to blame the spring but you can add a double-strength spring and it won’t help if the adjustments aren’t right. I will replace the clamp shaft tomorrow. Actually pull it out and put it in the other way. When I loosen the set screw and adjust the horizontal position the clamp works fine until I tighten the set screw. I think the set screw is falling into its old mark instead of setting up a few thousandths away.

Before I broke for lunch I took all the used needles I have and dumped them into a small container filled with “Mean Green”. A couple hours later after finishing with the SMC1 for the day I took them inside to the sink and gently scrubbed each one with a toothbrush. One must be careful to brush only in the direction the needle is pointing or up, as I think of it. I rinsed them off in a small colander in fresh water and then spread them out in the Texas sun. I can guarantee all moisture will be sucked out of them despite the horrendous humidity. After they’re dry I’ll inspect them with a jeweler’s loupe to make sure the needle point is conical and not damaged. Next comes the fun part of selecting and playing a record while installing one needle at a time to listen to it and see if it is usable. That will take two or three days as I don’t have the patience to do fifty at a time. I have a ton of the purple sapphire needles. These are all original Pickerings. I imagine the majority of them will be fine. I had sold quite a few used needles before and had so many people that let me know these original used needles sounded waaay better than the new needles now available. I think most operators changed them out fairly often. In home use these needles will last a real long time. Just keep the tonearm pressure about 3 grams.