TT-101 turntables…or any DD decks

Aigenga, I have some of that Redline Racing oil. It was recommended by Howard G Stern for use in the Kenwood L07D bearing. (Howard is the L07D guru and keeper of the L07D website, not the radio jerk.) Thanks to all for your suggestions. At the moment, I sent off the TT101 for repair of a persisting problem that neither I nor Bill Thalmann have been able to cure. I don't expect to have it back for a few months, but I will keep the ideas in mind. If the problem cannot be fixed, the rubbing noise is not going to concern me very much; I will have to put the TT101 on display as a museum piece or use it as a doorstop or a boat anchor.

Sorry to hear about the 'persisting problem', Lewm. Can you describe what it is and tell us who you sent it to? There exists a higher authority than Thalmann? I'd like to know his/her name for future reference.

I was afraid someone would ask. I described this once before.
Here is what it does, in my house. (It did not do this in Bill Thalmann's shop, last time I picked it up there; it worked perfectly.) When you start it up at either 33 or 45, it gets up to speed, but the tach reads typically 33.32 or 33.34, instead of 33.33. It will run properly for about 30 seconds to a minute. Then it shuts down back to "Power on" condition. When it thus shuts itself down, the brake action also fails to engage; the platter just continues to spin until friction and loss of inertia bring it to a stop. IF you press the STOP button while it is still up to speed, it DOES activate its brake (which in this case is simply the reverse servo activating). It was doing this when I brought it to Bill for a second time, several months ago. He re-soldered some questionable tracings, etc, and got it to work fine in his shop, as noted above. When I went to retrieve it, I also observed that it was working fine. Not so, when I got it back home to my house. (Bill's shop is about 30 minutes from my home, driving on the DC beltway, Rte 495.) I then took it apart and soldered the leads at some of those through-hole posts; Bill had already done some of that. Someone here, I think Aigenga recommended that approach, too. My efforts did nothing to correct the problem. In fact, if anything I made the problem a bit worse, because prior to that the tach would first go to 33.33, as it should, and only then start to show 33.34 before the shutdown. Frankly, I was embarrassed to take the thing back to Bill yet again. I Googled "Victor turntable repair" and found a place near Philadelphia, BC Electronics. Another hobbyist said that the guy at BC repaired his Sony 8750 very nicely after others had failed. He has my TT101 at this time. I am not optimistic that BC has any particular genius or insight into the TT101; he admitted that he had never worked on one.

Lewm: I was the one who suggested resoldering the tracings. I did so because my tt101 had the exact same problems you describe and that's how my tech fixed it. He told me he took the 'brute force' and resoldered them all. Did you and Bill do that? Because, evidently, visual inspection is insufficient.

Even after having done all that, my tech must have missed at least one. That's because the electronic brake stopped working consistently shortly after I got mine back. It sort of bugged me, but since everything else worked just fine I left well alone.

Now, to connect up with the true subject matter of this thread, in response to Halcro's observations I've left my 101 powered up. Two days in, the brakes started functioning again and has continued to work as it should ver since. So, leaving the unit powered up definitely has some effect on the circuitry. Thanks for fixing my brakes Halcro!

Whether it impacts sound, I'm not certain of that in my case. It does seem to have improved in certain respects, but I've not observed any clear progress day to day.

I am kind of regretting sending off my TT101, because I feel like I could have figured it out. And Bill would have been glad to help. He still does not even know that I've had problems since its second visit to his shop. He didn't even charge me the second time around. So far as I could tell by visual inspection, every single one of those through-hole eyelets had been re-soldered, by the time I got finished with it, and after Bill had already done most of them.

The weird thing was how it worked well in Bill's shop after the FIRST round of repair. I took it home and it had problems. I took it back, and after he did the above mentioned soldering, it worked fine again in his shop. You know the rest. Bill and I joked about an evil spirit in my house, because my Beveridge amplifiers also had a similar strange set of geographically dependent symptoms, for a while. The Bev amps are totally up and running now, however, with no problems at all.