Vintage DD turntables. Are we living dangerously?

rw and totem,
Last night I removed the screw cap on the bearing housing and inspected the bearing.  There is a very tiny dimple, probably about 1-2 millimeter in diameter, in the center of the teflon thrust plate, representing minimal wear after 30+ years, in my opinion.  The bearing itself looks OK without removing it, which I am loathe to do.  I will take a look at it with a magnifier to be sure it's ok.  The bearing oil looks only a little bit dirty. I wiped it out and soaked it up as much as I could with lens tissue, chosen for its lack of shredding, so it won't leave little shards of paper in the well. I will replace the original lube with either Technics oil which I ordered from KAB or Red Line 0W20 synthetic motor oil, the recommended lube for my L07D bearing.  I don't see any reason to change the thrust plate or the bearing itself, pending my close-up inspection of the latter. Then I will just screw in the cap a little farther than it was, so as to raise the spindle and the gray metal disc along with it, creating separation between it and the green PCB.  That's the plan.

Last night I changed the lube to Red Line 0W20, and everything seems good, once I fine tuned the adjustment of the screw cap. In my unit, there is a range of adjustment that is less than a quarter-turn (<90 degrees) between the unacceptable conditions of the gray disc rubbing against the top cover of the motor (spindle too high) and the gray disc rubbing against the PCB (spindle too low). Since the pitch of the thread in the cap is not steep, this seems too narrow for long term comfort, but we will see what transpires with continued use. I would rather not have to mess with the screw adjustment on a frequent basis.  I let everything settle overnight with platter, platter mat, and record weight in place over the spindle, before I will re-install the motor.  Just in case.

For what it’s worth, the platter definitely takes longer to coast to a stop with the Red Line oil in there than it did with the old factory oil. I’m not claiming that this matters at all.

Lewm
 Had you given any consideration to reversing the bearing wear pad
when you made your adjustments?

Totem,
Yes, I thought about it. But the evidence of any wear at all on the thrust pad is so minimal (a dimple <2 mm in diameter and depth), that I thought the risk associated with removing the pad from the cap and flipping it over (associated with the evident difficulty in getting it out of the cap in order to flip it; it appears to be glued in place) was not worth the reward. I inspected the ball bearing under magnification last night and I don’t see any wear at all on it. I conclude that my bearing assembly is nicely broken in as is. If I flip the thrust pad, then the ball and pad would have to re-seat up against each other, which is akin to break-in all over again.

Did you remove the thrust pad in your unit?

Luxman p444 has arrived. What a great turntable!
I’m looking forward to mount second tonearm.

Fitting in the Schick "12 tonearm with Argent MC500HS cartridge was not so easy, it took several hrs to play with alignment template comes with Hi-Fi Test LP. I haven't used this arm for a year or so, time to replace cheap Schick RCA's to Stereovox Xsadow RCA's, maybe. The sound is amazing with Saec SS300 mat. I don’t think this deck is worst than my SP10mk2, but Technics motor is more powerful, with Luxman it takes longer time to get the right speed from the start. The rest is just fine! I’m happy i don’t have to think about the plinth anymore. It’s state of the art turntable. Maybe i will replace side pannels with a proper exotic wood, but this is just a design.

It was nice to find out that Chris (Artisan Fidelity) already designed new wooden cabinet for PD444 (nice one), not sure if it’s better than Original PD444 style.