Oh, the carnage! On Monday, I hinted that I would be dissecting record players, to reassemble into a Frankenstein player capable of playing even the largest standard album size, 16 inches diameter. The picture to the right is how my workbench looked after trying to identify which record players were in fine working order and should not be disassembled. Those are all BSR drop-ins: BSR manufactured a zillion OEM turntables that were used in numerous electronics manufacturer’s record players. They are far from the best turntable, but they are the most common, and quite simple mechanically. All the major work is done at the top of the machine. The motor turns the platter, and when a gear is engaged, the rotating platter also powers the tone-arm rejection and repeat/cycle features. I have come to discover, and not just due to these players, that BSR drop-ins have a huge lubrication problem. In 3/4 of the machines I pulled apart, the control gear, the one that runs everything, was bound up and unable to turn on its axle. Since so much leverage was being used against the gear, what usually happened is the axle would shear off, and the rivet attaching it to the rest of the mechanism will begin to turn.
That gear only functions to run the fancy details — if the gear is removed from the system, the player will still turn and play fine, it just won’t do anything else, which is exactly what I want. In the end, I went with a non-BSR turntable (picked because the motor was the only part that worked) by GE, which used a similar internal mechanism. We did out best to remove as much of the mechanism as possible — including taking a hacksaw to the top details. As you can see, Destiny and I took turns. One side effect was that the hardware mechanism also controlled the power switch — leaving the turntable in an ‘always-on’ state. Plugging it in to a switched power strip solves the problem nicely. Disassembling the turntable was the longest step, mostly due to figuring out how much mechanics can be removed before the turntable becomes unusable.
The original tone arm and ’stack’ arm were removed, but a few small levers remained in place. I couldn’t disengage the rotation speed switch, because I still needed that control. I could have removed or altered the switch in some way, but clearance was still tight enough that the bottom of any record hanging out over the edge of the platter risked damage. If I couldn’t cut down the periphery, I would have to raise the album. Using several cardboard pizza boxes (note: excellent for shipping records as well), Destiny helped trace and cut out 12″ circles of cardboard. We stacked six together to gain about a half inch, which would be enough to clear all of the surrounding obstacles on the turntable. We did run into a problem, though: the new cardboard mat slowed down the turntable. On this turntable (and a surprising number of others), the post in the middle doesn’t turn — the cardboard mat was too tight, and it bound up against the pin. Using a power drill I opened up the hole a little bit, and then it began to spin fine.
Destiny and I now had a platter that can hold a 16″ record and spin the appropriate speed. Part 2 of the objective: Holding the needle against the record. In order to get the record to fit, the tone arm had to move, of course. In reality, the tone arm would have fit the record fine if it didn’t have to move. However, to get clearance, the tone arm’s pivot had to move 2″ away from the center of the platter.
Now, this is difficult to depict in a photo, so you’ll have to visualize: while the record’s groove goes around and around, the needle rubs against the side, left and right. If the tone arm or cartridge is out of alignment, the needle won’t be moving side-to-side; it will be rubbing the wrong way, which will detrimentally affect the sound, and potentially damage the needle. In moving and extending the arm, it would have to be done in a way that keeps the record/needle alignment correct. I could have used a variety of mathematics to figure out the best way to line up the tone arm, but I used something quicker: eyeballing it.
I was lucky when it came to the tone arm. The BSR pivot and mount, frankly, sucks: there’s no weight feature, and they’re mounted on a pivot that is 
integrated so much into the body of the turntable that there’s no easy way to move it to a new place. I did, however, have a BIC 940 turntable. Its platter and motor were voted down because it only did 33 and 45 speeds, but the tone arm is a self-contained part held down with four screws, and could be removed and transferred to another place rather easily. I removed its head, since I would be elongating it, and prepared to mount it. I salvaged a small plastic box, flipped it over, and screwed it to the side of the turntable to provide an extension and a base to mount the tone arm to. A little drilling, a few more screws, and the tone arm was attached to the new turntable.
To extend the tone arm, I took of the tube and head from a BSR table. BSR arms (or at least most I saw) are held to the pivot by a single screw, which releases the tone-arm ‘tube’ (with wires inside) completely free. In freeing the tone arm, I clipped the wires as close to the output as possible, leaving long lines still attached to the loose tone arm — don’t cut the wiring too short; you’ll need it later! I lined up the tone arm for both lateral movement and length to reach every track on a 16″ record, and Destiny was ready with the electrical tape to fix the arm in place.
In testing, a problem I discovered was skating. This is the tone-arm’s inherent desire to slide across the record unimpeded. I believe the BIC arm was designed with anti-skating built in to the turntable, but it was now free to move. Solution: two paperclips, a little thread, and a nut. I built a little anti-skating weight like the one on my Sansui record player. The thread and nut slide up and town, but add a little counter-force to prevent the arm from sliding inward. In the photo on the right, you can see another feature the BIC turntable provided: when extending the tone-arm, it adds additional weight at the needle. The BIC tone-arm has an excellent fine-tunable counterweight to accurately adjust the needle pressure on the record.
So, are you ready to see the frankenstein’s monster? It’s not pretty, but it is, in nearly every way, capable of playing pretty much every album that the professional turntables on WKRP could. Here it is:
I had to add a few minor things, like hard-wiring the phono cables to avoid pulling out the wiring accidentally, and bend a coathanger into a tone-arm rest. All testing worked extremely well — the turntable was the correct speed, the needle was able to mesh with the track at any point, and , as a side benefit, the ceramic cartridge lets me plug the turntable directly into the computer. So, in the interest of proving that the turntable works, here are several MP3s of what Destiny and I were able to play:
- The US Navy “Country Hoedown” closer; date unknown. I just enjoyed this because the long list of country performers is such a jumble of imaginative stage names, it resembles a list of spam email names.
- A commercial for Zayre Department Store in Racine, Wisconsin. Zayre was a chain of discount stores, with Wisconsin being about the westernmost edge of their region. The Racine store opened in the mid-60s, and the ad for a transistor radio pretty much dates the commercial to the mid-to-late-60s. This is just one of approximately 9 Zayre ads on a single disk.
- Landall’s Paints, 1514 Washington Ave, Racine — the store isn’t around anymore, and doesn’t exist on the internet. The record is of the same format, with similar labelling to the Zayre disc, which would also put it in the mid-1960s. This disk has twenty tracks, but there are only ten different commercials.
- And, the disc I wanted to listen to more than any other: The 1949 Kaiser Frazer spots from 1948. There are 8 commercials on the record, ranging from 15 seconds to 50 seconds (the longest is the one here). All commercials tout the 103 new features in the ‘69 Kaiser, without explaining what they were. I bet they were excellent.
