VPI Fatboys versus others in its' tonearm weight class.

What Harry says should be discounted. This is the guy that said anti skating was detrimental.

@skyscraper , It is a run of the mill gimbal arm certainly better than what you have and an easy swap but, it has deficiencies that would keep it from being an arm I would consider. If you want a more accurate assessment of what can me mounted on your table without much surgery take close up pictures of your tonearm base and if you can, the bottom side of the turntable and closeup of the area underlying the arm. The only measurement I need is your current spindle to pivot distance in mm please.  Send them to me and I will give you a good idea of what can be done.  From pictures I have seen It looks like it has a small removable tonearm board, very easy to copy. An ebony board would look killer. Any surface mount arm like the Reeds or the Tri Planar will mount easily if the length is right. It also looks to me like your current tonearm board is simply screwed down to the surface of the turntable. This means you can easily mount boards of various sizes and mount them using the same holes so no modification need to be done to the plinth itself. If you were to send me the old tonearm board it would take me about 30 minutes to make a new one. Shop time is $140/hour. The ebony would cost you another $30.00

I have never seen a VPI Classic but if what Mijo says is true, if you do have a removable mount, then why are we even here? You can have any tonearm you want provided the P2S distance is not crazily different from the OEM tonearm, simply by replacing the mount. You can probably acquire a replacement from VPI, or Mijo, or a sympathetic local machinist. And you won’t have to compromise the originality of the deck itself.

Well, if you look at around 2”00 and 2”45 in the video, you can clearly see the tonearm’s mounting hole at the bottom and at the top. So, if the Classic 2 is similar to the Classic in this video, it should be easy to make a mounting collar for another arm (if the tonearm’s shaft is of a small enough diameter), or for surface mount. Spindle to pivot distance also looks to be similar to other arms of same length. 

Gentlemen, below are a couple of pictures, front and back, of the model VPI Classic 2 I own. To me this tonearm set up looks like a fairly complex mechanism in total, that I’d be afraid to mess with. For those of you with expertise in this field, it may be easy pickings to deal with. But I’m not at the place where this is somewhere I want to go.

It is doubtless you could getter a better tonearm onto the Classic 2 readily with your admirable knowledge and skills, but please understand that process is more than I want to deal with now. So I’ll have to settle for less than the best, as long as the Fatboy is a reasonable choice.

At this point I’d like to find out if the Fatboy would be a a good replacement for my current tonearm, maybe not the best, but hopefully not the worst in it’s class. I am hoping this thread might address that concern. Mike’s suggestion the Fatboy is run of the mill, but certainly better than what I have now is more the type input I’m looking for right now.

@thekong 

if the Classic 2 is similar to the Classic in this video, it should be easy to make a mounting collar for another arm.

Its not - the Classic 2 has a surface mounted arm with the VTA adjuster. The basic Classic in the video has a conventional arm pillar - hence the armband hole.