Vintage DD turntables. Are we living dangerously?

Hi Misha

Come to Sydney for a holiday and bring your turntable.

Yes, Chris is in Sydney.

Cheers

Regensburg in Bavaria may be closer to you chakster......
That's where Thuchan's Tech resides and I've witnessed his work first-hand.
It's first class and he now knows the TT-101 inside out....

Hi Misha,

The two seconds for the display to change is normal.  If you put it in run mode you can watch it count up.  It does the same in hold mode, though only updates the display at the end of the cycle - every 1.8s IIRC.  

If it's stopping as Lew described you've a situation where too much current is being supplied to the motor.  Time won't fix this; it's likely there's a bad connection on the board.  

Chak, Your symptom sounds a bit different from mine, although maybe close enough to have the same cause.  As I wrote somewhere here, my TT101 would start up fine and go to correct speed, but it would very soon thereafter start to "hunt"; the tach would show 33.32, then 33.34, etc. Very shortly after that, the tach would go dark except for the decimal point, and the platter would coast to a halt.  This whole process from start to stall never took more than 2 minutes, tops.

Like JP says, in "HOLD" mode, the tach stays blank until it sees the set speed; then it displays.  Thus it is not abnormal to have a short time delay before the tach lights up, but at that moment, it should show the correct set speed.  In RUN mode, it counts up from zero to set speed, visually from the moment you press the button, so there is no delay in that mode.

Don't give up.  We are not living dangerously, just frustratingly.

SO WHAT CAN I DO? Is that require some sort fo special knowlegde or experience to fix it locally with some tech?

IMO, you probably don't require a man of knowledge. What you require is someone with soldering skills and keen eyes (aided by a magnifying glass). I haven't been following this thread very closely lately, but I believe a goodly percentage of tt 101's documented on this thread have been resurrected solely by resoldering all the joints. 

You need to find someone who will undertake that task. And make clear to him that even if a joint appears to be fine that he should re-do it anyways. My hero, Dave Brown, called it the brute force method