Vintage DD turntables. Are we living dangerously?

He didn't work on my Victor chakster (I'm in Sydney)....
He rebuilt Thuchan's who happens to live in Regensburg.
If you decide on this route, let me know and I will try to put you in contact with him....😎

@halcro oops, it was Lew you tried to send his tt-101 to Tuchan’s tech in Germany once.
PM sent

Chak, I am not sure what you are saying above, but in any case, my TT101 never went to Germany.  In fact, Thuchan did not buy his TT101 until well after mine had been repaired by JP.  Bill Thalmann had a shot at repairing mine, but it would not misbehave at any time in Bill's shop.  I left it with him twice, in fact.  That was another weird aspect of the problem.  As mentioned elsewhere, it would often work well in our kitchen but not in our basement (where I have a second system that now is driven by the TT101, alternating with my Lenco).  In retrospect, we can hypothesize that the fracture in the PCB tracing was causing an intermittent short which resulted in an intermittent problem that could come and go in relation to moving the turntable from place to place.  Trucking it in my car on the DC beltway over to Bill's shop was good for it on the way out and bad for it on the way back to my house.  (Tongue in cheek, of course.) I still have great faith in Bill.

My other point would be that re-soldering all the joints did not cure the problem, because it was basically caused by a fracture in the PCB, cutting across a tracing on the PCB.  JP mentioned his wider experience with the fragility of the PCBs.  So, one might consider going over the PCB with a magnifying glass. Even when JP told me where to look, after he repaired mine, I could not easily see the fault or his repair of it.

Lew, i made notes reading this thread. The source for my suggestion was your old post (see the quote below). I assume it never happened and you shipped to JP, which is great.

@lewm

I am also thinking hard about sending my Victor TT101 to Germany so that Thuchan’s guy can fix it, once and for all. I got an email from Thuchan today; he is thrilled with the sound of his TT101. This is a guy who owns some of the most expensive turntables in the world, so I take his praise for the TT101 very seriously. 

Thuchan had evidently purchased a broken TT101 with Halcro’s help, and his tech determined that it needed replacement of SC3042. Until this recent episode, I had no idea whether the chips I bought (from a vendor in Hong Kong) were genuine or even in operating condition, but Thuchan’s tech got his TT101 up and running perfectly by virture of installing the chip I sent. This is great news for me as well, because I have more SC3042 chips on hand. (By the way, I think they are still available from China and Hong Kong.)

I just checked shipping quotes for 12kg parcel and Germany is affordable, USA is expensive, but Oz is terribly expensive to ship to. And that was just registered mail, not an express. So i would appreciate any help to get in toucht with Tuchan’s tech guy for consultation. I see the problem with Tuchan’s drive was different than mine, so i want to ask if he’s familiar with my problem and if it’s possible to fix and calibrate everything to keep this deck for years. Thanks

Sorry, Chakster.
Evidently my memory of the chronology of events is faulty.  Your quote of my old post suggests that Thuchan's TT101 was up and running before mine.  Otherwise, I would not have been "thinking hard" about sending my own TT101 to Germany, back then.  However, I never did send it to Germany, because I (subsequently) found JP in NYC.  Thanks for setting me straight.

By any chance, do you know the date of that post you quoted?