Eminent Technology ET-2 Tonearm Owners

Chris.
Back in the day, nearly 20 years ago, I took a piece of aluminium to a machine shop along with the original plastic goose neck, set at the mid position and said to the machinist "copy this please". I did ask him to make the part that slid into the wand one thou bigger in dia as I felt that it was not a good fit in the wand I was using. There was no drawing produced. Now days to get a part machined in my shop I need a CAD drawing at $150/hour to produce. A CAM program at $150/ hour to produce. Machining itself at $450/hour, plus material which actually is the smallest cost of the lot. If we were making 100's it would be viable, but a small number would be very costly. The best option is to find a local machine shop that has lathes and milling machines and take an original goose neck along "please copy this" I used the same aluminium as the wand, 6061 T6, from memory. This info is somewhere in the manual.
Sorry I cannot be more helpful but, I would recommend that anyone interested goes through the effort. There is really a big jump up in performance when the quite flexible original is replaced.

Now days to get a part machined in my shop I need a CAD drawing at $150/hour to produce. A CAM program at $150/ hour to produce. Machining itself at $450/hour, plus material which actually is the smallest cost of the lot.

Very Interesting numbers Richard, thanks for sharing. The numbers reminded me of my former job. If I can digress for a bit and share something - for a different perspective. The company I used to work for charged me out to clients as a project manager at a straight $225 US an hour. A senior consultant was $180 and a consultant $125. A typical work project budget would be based on a respective 10, 20, 70 percentage workload split with myself managing 10 or more projects. (And my wife still wonders why I don't want to go back to work). For this you got electronic and paper plans that you hoped you would never have to use. Mostly theory based but did include one practice run through at the end. Imagine that. Hard to believe for me now. Nothing really tangible. The employee skills gained during the project to use the plans eroded with with company turnover. Anyway.

Some observations aluminum versus stock gooseneck.

The aluminum gooseneck combined with the heaviest mag armwand has taken the resonances for my modded 2.5 tonearm into MC only territory now (based on my ears) which is ok with me. I have a couple of MC cartridges I really like. Whether this is more the mag wand influence over the aluminum gooseneck I can't say. They came to me at roughly the same time period. I do sense it is more the mag wands influence, as it was designed for low compliance MC cartridges by Bruce so things do kind of add up to what I am hearing. As you are an MC user Richard I highly recommend acquiring a mag wand if one becomes available to try out.

In contrast - our cracker jack box cartridge MM 420str discussed here sounds quite strident now on the 2.5 with the 420's higher compliance. But the 420 sounded great before on the 2.5 with Carbon Fibre armwand and stock gooseneck; and it still does sound great on my second ET2 with stock gooseneck and aluminum armwand. So what this tells me when looking at improvements and upgrades with vinyl, is there are no absolutes, generalizations can't be made, and whether something is an improvement will depend on each person's individual situation as our audio kit setup and preferences and goals are all different.

One more observation. The aluminum gooseneck is as you say set at the midpoint level of adjustment.
From a stylus adjustment point of view, if someone likes playing with a lot of cartridges, we can partially blame the MM thread for some of this behavior ?, you could very likely have someone who has a few cartridges hooked up to 2 or 3 armwands ready to interchange; the three armwand stylus level settings on the stock gooseneck comes in very very handy, with the different size/length cartridge bodies and styluses. The three adjustments allow the midpoint inscribed line on the manifold to stay constant and level with the record surface for wow and flutter control. I don't have problems with multiple cartridges (I have problems in other areas) so setting up one cartridge for an extended length of time and dialing it in with the aluminum gooseneck works really well with me and l really like it.

Feel lucky to have it and wanted to spread the joy if possible. If someone reading this can help us out please chime in. The person I referred to earlier has a friend machinist, so the actual machinist cost (highest numnber) could be contained. But he needs the CAD drawing.

Just a note as well that the stock ET2 gooseneck is made up of two parts. Aluminum on the armwand side and carbon fibre on the air bearing spindle side.

Cheers

Has anyone ever tried making titanium or magnesium goosenecks?

Chris / Ketchup
Yes the numbers scare me, but they are necessary to cover even more frightening expense numbers. The beast, which is our business, roars out every minute of every day saying "feed me!"

Absolutely, a mag wand is on the wish list for use with my MC cart.

A mag or titanium goose neck, now that is an interesting idea.

Ketchup,
I have played with titanium components on the ET2 some years ago. I overhauled a company that manufactured custom wheelchairs, including custom titanium frames, with custom brackets to meet individuals needs. Unfortunately titanium is very brittle to machine, it shatters very easily and I think you will find it difficult. As an aside titanium tube is not rigid, you can actually bend it by hand, but it does have fantastic damping qualities. I have a titanium arm tube sitting around somewhere, but have not used it.

With regard to the aluminium one piece gooseneck, mine is the same as Krebs, and I use it in an ET2 & aluminium arm tube with both MC ( Carnegie, Koetsu, Denon 103 ) & MM ( Shure V15Vxmr with brush removed ). I have never had stridency from my ET2.
Bear in mind my ET2 aluminium arm tube has had the foam & shrink wrap removed, the teflon insert in the headshell removed and replaced with carbon fibre. I also run a loose decoupled counterweight ( tuned with teflon bushes ) that is much lossier than the standard spring for both MM & MC. Frogman has trialled this and attained the same benefits of quicker and more transparent bottom end ( literally more notes in his system ).
So my suggestion to Chris if he wants to run an MM in the ET2.5 with the aluminium gooseneck would be to try loosening off the counterweight nut and lower the overall horizontal mass ( above FR ). If you back the nut off and then dial it in slowly whilst listening to the changes you can tune the counterweight motion quite precisely, even more so if you put a tiny wedge either side of the spring to control the motion ( I used teflon ).