A turntable from eBay, which arrived with a snapped counterweight.
Sadly the returns period had expired and the owner couldn’t send it back. Worse still, he had bought a new tone arm, when I could have easily mended the old one. Oh well…

Having swapped the cartridge, replacing the arm [and counterweight] is a simple case of removing a small pin. Mechanically that’s it, but there are the 4 wires from the pickup to solder too. I took this photo to remind me which colour wires should go where.

With everything reassembled I balanced the tone arm (anywhere between 3g and 5g tracking force according to the manual) and plugged it in for a test.

Stylus balance, used to achieve the correct tracking force

A bit of 80’s Deep Purple, ideal for testing 🙂

£10 charged for this, which was labour time plus some travelling