Sota Comet Grounding question


Hi,

I recently picked up a Sota Comet with a Jelco JA 250st tonearm for cheap because the arm needed rewiring. It was my first time rewiring, I used cardas wire and tags, and attached a ground wire inside the arm tube as well as one attached to the arm base. All the wiring connects to a terminal in the chassis, where the rca cables are soldered. The two ground wires connect to the grounding cable which runs to the lug on my preamp.

The question I have is regarding the ground lug that is at the bottom of the chassis. It looks to me like this lug connects to the motor. Where do I connect a ground wire from this to? I am getting an awful lot of static whenever I touch the platter which can be heard through the speakers, and occasionally when I touch the tonearm. There is no hum and everything sounds fine when a record is playing, but as far as I can tell the chassis is not grounded to anything which I’m hoping once this is done could solve the static issue. I tried running a ground wire from this chassis lug to the same lug on the preamp that the tonearm is grounded to which did not resolve the problem. 

Can anyone help me resolves this. I don’t get static from my Thorens or Rega tables, so I hope this is specific to the Sota turntable and can be easily fixed.


mcwatson
MC, the motor and chassis should be connected to house ground. If there is not one already you might try connecting a wire to the main bearing then to the motor then to house ground. If this does not work call SOTA. They are usually very helpful. 
Thanks, I contacted Sota and they said the chassis ground should be connected to the preamp. I still get a lot of static this way. The bearing well is some sort of Teflon or plastic so I can’t add a wire to that. I may revisit my tonearm wiring just to be sure I didn’t miss anything there and then try a humidifier or something like that.
I agree i had a SOTA Cosmos it it made a big popping sound grounding the motor fixed the problem.
Hi ebm,
Out of curiosity did you ground the motor to a preamp or amp or directly to a house ground? Connecting to my preamp isn’t working but maybe I need to make sure all the grounding posts in my system are more secure. I don’t know how to ground directly to an outlet. Thanks!