Vintage Denon Direct Drive Turntable

Thanks Treehugga. If you wanted to have slate cut out at half height partway into the block, does that work? Or does it have to be the same vertical cut through the piece? In a simple example, I am thinking of a cylindrical cut out with diameter of 6 inches going halfway through the block, stopping there with a horizontal plane, and then having a further cutout of 4 inches' diameter going the rest of the way through. If so, that makes for some interesting possibilities, but I do not know how these things are cut. Perhaps the only way to do that is to cut two pieces with super flat surfaces (with cutouts beforehand) and bond them.

Treehugga and T_bone, As I now understand the operation of a waterjet, it cannot make router-like cuts and patterns; it can only cut the material all the way thru. This obviously imposes some limitations for plinth designs. I would have liked to have been able to create a recess into which one could insert a tonearm mounting platform. T_bone, I am not sure I understand your idea, but I think it cannot be executed with a waterjet. You'd be able to do it with separate layers of slate. Treehugga, at my suggestion, the CAD guy designed the program so that the three holes for mounting the Denon were cut FIRST, before the major central cut-out was done. This worked out fine.

My post of 01-26-09 should be ignored. I later learned that using a CNC milling machine to cut the hole for the Denon would be very very expensive vs using a water jet and probably less precise.

Lew, I was asking about routing, for the armboard recess, inside the main plinth, rather than making a second plinth for an armboard (which should be possible with a waterjet as it could simply be two pieces of the same single slab (a large rectangular with a square cut out at one corner), though small adjustments could be difficult to make using a large block of slate...

T_bone, that sort of an idea for an armboard went thru my mind also. But how are you going to support the rectangular slate armboard, once it's been cut out of the main slate slab? It could be done, but nothing I thought of seemed satisfactory, given that I believe it's a good idea to have solid coupling of the tonearm to the bearing. If you like to de-couple the tonearm, which some people do, it is more do-able. The best compromise would be to use two slabs of slate, one on top of the other. Then the armboard could be created by cutting out a corner of the topmost slab, with a commensurate hole in the bottom slab to permit passage of the tonearm shaft and wiring.