Our chakster believes in manufacturer authority and intentions despite our long disputes about tonearm geometry. In addition he distrust retippers and never retipped any of his carts. So his advice is ’’based’’ on his believes.
Been using at least 4 re-tipped and re-cantilevered cartridges and all of them were worst than the originals, so never again (and this is one of the reason i am against the retip/refurbishing), for me it’s obvious that no one can make better than the original, especially if the original manufacturer is a BIG company and cartridge design is a clever design. Re-tip is a compromise only, people trying to pay less and they will get what they are paying for. Using a third party parts instead of the original is worst idea in my opinion and some cartridge designers already posted about it on this forum many times. I have no idea why people retip cartridges or refurbish them if better cartridges available even for the price of the retip (many great cartridges available at $500-700).
The difference between Stevenson and Beearwald is about 1mm.
Aka effective length Stevenson 245 mm, Bearwald 246mm.
You are talking about Pivot to Spindle distance, but how can you twist a cartridge designed for Stevenson to align it by cantilever position,
there are 3 steps in any protractor and the problem is not that stylus can reach those points, the problem is that a cartridge body must be turned to the left or to the right in the headshell because the cantilever must be in line with lines printed on protractor, your headshell intergated cartridge will be off the alignment and changing PS will not help you, because FR7 does not move to the left or to the right in the headshell at all. Some people just don’t understand it! They want to create more problems for FR7 series.
With Axel my retipper for years I become friends. Alas he was/is not able to do the work because he lost comand of his left hand. But he
was nearly 70 and with 50 years of experience.
Axel refurbished cartridges are worst than the originals and i was able to make sure about it, compared them in my system. He’s been using Nagaoka cartrilevers transplanted from Nagaoka cartridges to Technics MM by gluing them using as you said joint pipe. Those cartridges are worst than the original, because the boron cantilever is rod, not pipe (like the OG) and stylus is glued. The last cartridge he touched stop working after 1 year (one channel malfunction). This is waste of time and money. It will never be better than the original (if the original design is a good one). Invest in original cartridges, perfectly working samples, NOS units and you will be fine. Don’t like them - buy another (better cartridges). Any good cartridge is a very delicate devise and it’s better not touch it. We see many retipped and refurbished cartridges for same, this is the best place for them. Only manufacturer can guarantee that a cartridge will be the same as new after their service, but even manufacturers prefer to give us a brand new cartridge instead of the broken one.
