Turntable Fixing

 I got an old record player from Salvation Army about a year ago for my girlfriend's apartment, and it worked intermittently until a couple of days ago when it stopped working completely.  It seemed that something was causing the turntable to not engage when the stylus was positioned over the record.

So I got my screwdriver out to see what the issue was.  This is what I found.  The connection wasn't being made.  These two pieces of metal were supposed to make contact when the stylus was positioned.  Here, in this picture, the stylus is at rest and the connection is not being made.

(see picture).

Less clear, however, was that when the connection was supposed to be made, it still wasn't.  I tried pushing the copper pieces closer together, bending it so that it would make contact easier, but it still didn't seem that certain that the fix would work for long.

What really needed to be done was to eliminate that part as a whole, because it really was not a great design and after so many years of use, it had pretty much stopped being reliable.

So I cut off the leads which led to that mechanism.  It was one single red wire leading to a DC motor.  The return wire went directly to the motor, and the positive wire went to the problem.

I re-routed the wiring so that it went directly to an SPST switch.  That switch was now the new "on/off connection point for the turntable.

I can now turn on and off the turntable with that switch, which is much more reliable than the old way!  And I can also put my turntable back together again and listen to music.