Because life is like that

I have been engaged with a personal project lately……building a turntable thus did'nt get to update my blog.

This is by far my ‘biggest and ambitious’ project based on my primitive technical background and a limited budget of 2k. Though I own 3 tables.....Sota Sapphire, Micro Seiki and a direct drive Luxman PD 121, its nothing like playing an LP on a self built turntable.

Week 1
Firstly, the design.....how the end product should look like. A search in the net resulted in varied designs....from weird to robotic looking machine. Anyway, my design will be based on aesthetic rather then engineering. After much thought, I decided on a double plinth table.

Week 2
I did some sketches translating my thoughts onto the drawing board. Finally, decided on an octagonal shaped double plinth that could accommodate more then one tone arm with an outboard motor unit.


Front view


Top view


Week 3 & 4
Next would be searching for supplier of the components needed. Teres and Schue had stopped selling its components for diy. Diyhifi supply is another supplier of diy components. Decided to get the motor assembly and platter from them. Unfortunately bearing is out of stock. (first problem).
Approached local machinist to re-drill the hole on the platter so that I could use bearing from other supplier. Unfortunately, no one does that locally (second problem).

The plinth……1st choice granite.
2nd choice corian
3rd choice acrylic
4th choice MDF

1st and 2nd choices are out. No one is willing to fabricate for me. Thus acrylic is the choice for my plinth. Anyway, it matches the BIX acrylic platter from diyhifi.

Week 5 & 6
Ordered the components from diyhifi and sent my plinth design to a local acrylic fabricator. Delivery was super fast…..receiving the items from diyhifi within one week of ordering. The platter is a polished acrylic 40mm thick and the motor assembly is a massive 4.5 kg thingy. The finishing of both platter and motor assembly were of high quality. Hopefully it performs as high.



Polished acrylic platter



The massive DC motor assembly. The motor is from Holland by Premotec

Week 7 (this week)
Plinth should be ready anytime this week. The plinth is 30 mm thick and the armboard is 20 mm thick.