I picked this one up the other day - you might have spotted it on www.avsa.co.za
This one was just too interesting to pass up.
This table originally belonged to the Gallo pressing plant in the South of Johannesburg. When that operation closed the plant manager got the turntable. Being a finicky fellow he has kept it in good condition. It came with nice little bits and bobs too like a Stanton 981 HSZ cartridge and a Pickering with the 'pan' brush upfront...
Here is some great information about the table from a German website (if you spreuken nicht Deutch like me - then use Google Translate)
http://www.captndifool.de/?/plattens?/thorens/thorens-td-520
The only real problem so far is the auto stop mechanism. I opened the base and indeed the tonearm was setup with auto-stop. I took apart the mechanism and discovered that the LED had failed. The reason it failed was because someone before me has put black heatshrink around it to 'block' the light and disable the 'auto-stop'.
Replacing the LED was easy enough. Resetting the sickle (shutter) was not easy. As seems to be the standard with these turntables the shutter on mine has cracked at the point it connects to the tonearm.
There is a flaw in the implementation with the SME tonearm. I set the shutter with the arm aligned as I received it. Once I was happy with the operation I set about aligning the cartridge properly which brought the arm forward. This changed the 'stop point' slightly and I needed to go back and reset the 'stop' point on the shutter...
This one was just too interesting to pass up.
This table originally belonged to the Gallo pressing plant in the South of Johannesburg. When that operation closed the plant manager got the turntable. Being a finicky fellow he has kept it in good condition. It came with nice little bits and bobs too like a Stanton 981 HSZ cartridge and a Pickering with the 'pan' brush upfront...
Here is some great information about the table from a German website (if you spreuken nicht Deutch like me - then use Google Translate)
http://www.captndifool.de/?/plattens?/thorens/thorens-td-520
The only real problem so far is the auto stop mechanism. I opened the base and indeed the tonearm was setup with auto-stop. I took apart the mechanism and discovered that the LED had failed. The reason it failed was because someone before me has put black heatshrink around it to 'block' the light and disable the 'auto-stop'.
Replacing the LED was easy enough. Resetting the sickle (shutter) was not easy. As seems to be the standard with these turntables the shutter on mine has cracked at the point it connects to the tonearm.
There is a flaw in the implementation with the SME tonearm. I set the shutter with the arm aligned as I received it. Once I was happy with the operation I set about aligning the cartridge properly which brought the arm forward. This changed the 'stop point' slightly and I needed to go back and reset the 'stop' point on the shutter...
