sonddek
Trade: SUPATRAC
My Amadeus motor started buzzing, rattling and shaking. I think the bearing was worn due to my failure to oil it from time to time. It lay fallow for a year or two.
Yesterday I opened it up and had a good look around. Pear Audio's advice was to rotate the motor in its hole by 90º. This has worked perfectly and the motor is now completely silent and running beautifully.
While I had it open I ordered a spare motor on ebay. It's a £3 door-bell motor, Mabuchi RF-500TB-12560 12V. The means of mounting is beautifully simple, like all Firebaugh's designs. A 1-2mm thick sticky foam pad around the axle on the top surface of the motor attaches it to a square sheet of rubbery-plastic about 3mm thick. This square of rubber is clamped down onto the plinth surface so that the corners are gripped under a steel plate, bolted down. The motor is also surrounded by an unattached tubular sleeve of neoprene/foam, the wall being about a cm thick. This fits snugly in the plinth hole and maintains the vertical axis of the motor while transferring scant vibration to the plinth. Firebaugh is a genius of cost-effective pragmatic design - anybody could make this for a few quid. "An engineer is somebody who can do for two bob what any fool can do for a quid."
I will be using this excellent deck as my 10.5 inch Blackbird testing platform and I'm pleased to have it up and running again.
Well Tempered products perform to the highest standards and are worth the money not because of the cost or precision of the components which are used, but because of the ruthless and well-judged engineering logic applied to the inveterate problems of the turntable.
Yesterday I opened it up and had a good look around. Pear Audio's advice was to rotate the motor in its hole by 90º. This has worked perfectly and the motor is now completely silent and running beautifully.
While I had it open I ordered a spare motor on ebay. It's a £3 door-bell motor, Mabuchi RF-500TB-12560 12V. The means of mounting is beautifully simple, like all Firebaugh's designs. A 1-2mm thick sticky foam pad around the axle on the top surface of the motor attaches it to a square sheet of rubbery-plastic about 3mm thick. This square of rubber is clamped down onto the plinth surface so that the corners are gripped under a steel plate, bolted down. The motor is also surrounded by an unattached tubular sleeve of neoprene/foam, the wall being about a cm thick. This fits snugly in the plinth hole and maintains the vertical axis of the motor while transferring scant vibration to the plinth. Firebaugh is a genius of cost-effective pragmatic design - anybody could make this for a few quid. "An engineer is somebody who can do for two bob what any fool can do for a quid."
I will be using this excellent deck as my 10.5 inch Blackbird testing platform and I'm pleased to have it up and running again.
Well Tempered products perform to the highest standards and are worth the money not because of the cost or precision of the components which are used, but because of the ruthless and well-judged engineering logic applied to the inveterate problems of the turntable.