How To Control The Eager Beaver

Most automatic turntable are now very old and are in need of lubrication and servicing.  Most of the gears used in auto table are mode from plastic which have become hard and brittle which can result is loss of gear teeth.

Not enough anti-skate, it is pulling in as soon as it hits the surface, it takes a few grooves just to keep it in a groove, and it is pulling in too much the entire play, of EVERY LP, wearing both the stylus and the grooves.

are you able to adjust anti-skate on that unit?

You cannot rely on the dials/indicators being accurate, you can set it visually.

Get one of these protractor discs with ’other side blank’.

hudson hifi protractor, other side blank

after you double-check all your alignments on the protractor side, set anti-skate to zero, set your tracking weight

now, on the disc’s blank side, manually spin the platter, lower the arm, see it pull in even though no grooves, that is the natural force any and all pivoted arms exhibit.

adjust the anti-skate slowly while seeing the results, check in a little from the outer edge, check out a little bit from the inner edge, make the best compromise.

Most often, skipping inward has to do with the point a which the arm is set down and the speed at which the arm is set down.  Records have a raised bead around the edge of the record to strengthen the record at its most exposed part, and in the old days, to keep the playing surface from contacting another record when stacked for automatic play.  When the needle is set down on top of that raised bead, it falls down that little hill and can gain enough momentum to slide past the first grooves.  If you have the ability to adjust the point of set down, choose a point farther into the record and away from the edge.  It seems counter intuitive to set a needle down further into the record when it is skipping the first grooves, but this works.  It also helps to have a slow descent of the arm to also reduce the momentum sliding down the edge bead.

If you cannot adjust the set down point, you can keep the arm cued up, and before cuing down, you can nudge the arm a little bit inward to miss the bead.

While excessive anti-skating can exacerbate the problem, it is not the primary cause.  If it were the cause the needle would continue to slide in well past the first few grooves because skating force is not much different between the first contact point and where it stops sliding inward.  

@larryi 

  I suspect that is the issue.  My dealer had just checked the settings on the tt and cart.  When I manually lower the arm about half the time the issue occurs; probably I am setting it past the hill on some occasions.

I agree with Larry in that I think the stylus is sliding on the raised lip. That plus too low a setting of VTF could result in the observed problem. But I would also point out that the skating force does pull the stylus inward toward the label, so too much AS (which pulls in the opposite direction) would not be expected to be the cause of this problem. Maybe try increasing VTF by just a hair so as not to exceed the recommended max? And see that that does.

However, the skating force alone is usually not sufficient in magnitude to account for the observation, unless the tonearm is wildly misaligned. Think of it, zero anti-skate, which results in unopposed skating force, all other things being properly adjusted, does not cause the stylus to skip outer grooves per se. Moreover, the skating force is not maximal at the outermost grooves.