Advice for Building a turntable

Yes since it will not be a Spring Loaded design, Mass Loading will equal Mass Dampening. Make sure your rack is just as robust to handle this beast!

Hi Pedrillo,

Have you read the original correspondance between the primary architects of a DIY effort to clone Thomas Scheu's high mass Premier tunrtable. Their efforts later became the high-end turntable companies Teres Audio, Galibier Design, and Red Point Audio.

The original builders have kindly saved all their discussions for anyone interested in DIY turntable design and made them available on the Teres Audio website. The entire archive of all the their analysis and research into:
Bearing and Platter
Base and Subchassis
Motor and Controller
Drive Belts
Bearing Oil
Arms and Cartridges
Cartridge Alignment
Record Clamping

There is a detailed discussion and explanation of absolutely everything needed to design a reference level high mass table. More importantly, if you read the entire discussion in order(it's is humungous), you see all the wrong assumptions they make and later figure out. Also, all the obvious assumptions that later turnout to be less than optimal. It can save you months or years of effort and an untold amount of money on wrong turns.

Also, you can save yourself a lot of effort by buying precision bearings, platters, and motors specifically for high mass tables directly from Teres or Scheu Analogue. Not cheap, but what you get is of the highest quality.

There are also several long discussions/projects on every part of a turntable in the archives of DIY Audio's Analogue forum(examples 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6).

Anyway, I hope this provides a good start for your project.

if you haven't already you should check out the forums on http://www.diyaudio.com/. There's one whole forum dedicated to Analog projects, and many DIY tables.

I see you have posted several questions in this vein here, and its not that this isn't a helpful crowd, but it is generally not a DIY crowd. I would follow the advice above and look for forums geared more towards DIY.

great links Mr. Moebius

I'll never build one but that looks like interesting reading and a good place to start.

Hi Herman,

I'm with you, DIY TT's are way out of my league. But, there are some really fascinating discussions as to what actually goes into the design of a seemingly simple turntable. As a result of reading a healthy portion of their journey, I have a whole new appreciation for the field.

Surprisingly, none of the principals knew anything about TT design, CNC machining (though, one of the brothers did), etc.

Great links for great reading,Darkmoebius!
Thanks
George

On my list of things to do is a TT also...way down on the list though....

This is an interesting site with an Intake valve from a Harley Davidson for bearing, I guess you could use a Chevy intake valve also but it won´t sound so cool!!!

http://www.altmann.haan.de/turntable/

I would start here..

Dear Pedrillo: If you can use " metal " material instead of wood or acrylic. If you have two good TT designs one made from wood/acrylic and one from metal, this one outperforms the quality sound reproduction of the non-metal designs, at least in my experience.

Regards and enjoy the music.
Raul.