FFS! Audiosexual, the 101’st gender. FML!
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About 10 years ago B-i-L gave me a Technics SL10 which a friend of his had thrown out because of not working reasons. I took the nice EPS310MC cartridge out of it (P Mount) put it in an adapter and have used it in conventional arms on & off since. The SL10 (in its box) went in the loft.
Recently I took it down, watched a few useful servicing videos on Youtube & set about trying to get the linear tracking arm to work. Long story short it needed a new drive belt for the mechanism, the bar/rail the arm runs on needed a good clean and a couple of minor adjustments needed to be made.
For those that don’t know the SL10 is a very compact automated TT which is based on the same or similar motor to that in the 1200/1210.
The linear tracking arm is inside the lid.
It’s all beautifully made & quite easy to get apart & work on.
Anyhow the arm now all works but sadly the cartridge doesn’t (on one channel). Not sure why but in the meantime I’ll order an AT mm P mount & put that in & put up a film of it playing when its fully working. One of the few bits of HiFi I’ve got that Gill was actually impressed by, for its compact neatness I imagine.
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I hope it’s via horns. Need more videos.
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Operates from 12v as well from memory. One for the car?
Nearly bought one of those decades ago during my great hifi hiatus (‘hifiatus’), but moronically decided it must be ‘jap crap’ and couldn’t possibly sound any good, so drank the ££ instead… 
How do you align the arm with the edge of the record with irregularly sized records? I can see the lift/drop button, but not so clear on the above.
Also reminds me I have two decks here left with me by ‘friends’ - “You know about hifis - fix this would you [for free, natch]”. It’s been years, so hopefully they’ve learned their lessons by now…
There are 3 LEDs under the platter that shine up through holes in the platter & mat towards photocells in the lid. A 7 inch single covers the inner LED, a 10" the 2nd LED & a full 12" LP covers all 3. From this the deck determines the diameter of the record & the arm can cue up & drop down accordingly. There’s a manual speed override available if the deck is detecting a 12" single & trying to play it at 33.33 rpm.
The clever thing with the P mount cartridge system is that all the cartridges had the same weight and were all made to track at 1.25g so they are easily interchangeable. The SL10 has an MM/MC switch so that if their own MC cartridge is used, then an internal head amp boosts the output to MM level but the deck doesn’t have a phono stage. For some reason I’d thought it did have one.
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Lovely TT’s. Sounds more than decent with the EPC310MC cart, too.
Sadly my 310 has dropped a channel & I can’t even see how to get into it to have a look. The channel that plays sounds fine. Must be a broken wire between coil & output pins
I used to have the 7, nice decks and well made. Will play mounted vertically as well. Should play upside down too, why you would want to is another thing!
The tone arm seems to have a small counterweight and vtf is slightly adjustable too so presumably there’s a fulcrum? Need to look more closely to see how downforce is applied when I fit the new cartridge. Hard to see how it’d function out of horizontal even if the record is clamped.
The seven was spring loaded.
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Well, the smoothing caps are back in, and the shame is palpable…
…but hopefully functional 
I really should power-up at this point and see if the magic smoke escapes from anything, but the process of rebuilding and dismantling alone is about 2 days work thanks to the deeply-unserviceable nature of this device’s design.
So the ball gets rolled a bit further on.
Next-up are the fixed voltage regulators - a brace of 7812s. Could have been an easy job but where’s the fu… er… faff in that?
I decided to remove the enormous, blingy gold heatsinks to make drilling them for the new regs easier. I’m glad I did, because they were soldered in place really weakly on rather loosely attached pins. Because they’re so tall, they are easy to twat, and every flex is a potential fractured solderjoint - even just expansion and contraction could cause harm - so it’s time for change -
Drilled-out the base to 2.5mm then tapped for M3. This will let me (or, indeed, whomever) dismantle things more easily if needs be, plus I can use some nylon washers to both ease and spread the mechanical load on the PCB a bit.
Pulling the 7812s revealed that our erstwhile PCB genius had thru-holes far too widely-spaced for TO-220 package regs - that’s a PITA for me, because the NewClassD UWB2 regs I have lined-up do not like having their little legs spread!
So yet another component is going to need additional leads making for it… #sigh#
Another frequent issue also raises its ugly head:
This isn’t me clumsily lifting pads - no, all-over this feckin’ PCB there are solder lands that have tiny or no solder pads on the underside! They were just never there! I don’t know whether it’s sloppy design, or crappy manufacture (or a bit of both).
For some reason the left channel is by far the worst, and the topside is usually fine - but that’s harder to solder as you’re at greater risk of damaging components, plus there’s the simple and obvious need to ensure full solder contact with all traces…
So it’s an hour of scratching with scalpel and scratch-brushes until they look like this:
And that is me done for today…!
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The journey is the same as others just different environments…
More of this AA
After spending a chunk of yesterday on the cold, damp ground under the Hilux, not a whole lot of soldering got done… But today the NewClassD voltage regs grew longer legs, got some little trousers, and everything was first screwed together, and then soldered in place -
Pleased to say the cleaned-up solder pads worked fine and the solder flowed thru to the top of the board just as it should, which was a slight relief…
Couple more power resistors to change, LED terminals to solder in, then armfuls of outsized foo capacitors to wire-in… Still haven’t worked-out how I’m going to support those…
After that, a final clean-up, then I’ll discover if I can remember how it all goes back together . . . and then it’s Magic Smoke Time! Wheeeee!!!
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Video of switch on required 
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Money says it works first time.
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Normally I’m pretty certain something will work - or at least not expire spectacularly - but this thing is both moderately complex - with microprocessor controlled bits’n’bobs, plus a worryingly fragile PCB, and add to that the new regs are going to be pushed very hard indeed. If a couple of 78xx die, no biggy, they’re about £3 each - the NCD ones are £30! 
There will be no video - watching a grown man cry is an odd aspiration, even for you lot…
Didn’t that used to be Solidstateman’s avatar! 
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Chassis for sale