Vintage DD turntables. Are we living dangerously?

You forgot to include the 'extra overcharge' and 'special undercoating' (seinfeld reference).

I was quoted a much higher number by a very reputable tech to do the same on my less complicated sp10 mk2.

But if that's the number, to be sure I would jump at it.

Dear Banquo, You could perform the work yourself. Watch a Youtube on desoldering and resolding. You will get great satisfaction doing it yourself. I fine-tip soldering iron only costs about $20 and desoldering braid about $5.

If you do it yourself, which I endorse also, it is worthwhile to invest in a "solder station". This is essentially a soldering iron with feedback, so it maintains a constant temperature, which you can set on a dial control. They cost more like $50 to $100 but a good one lasts forever and you can use it for other minor repairs in future.

Was the "reputable tech" named Bill Thalmann? If so, Bill would do much more than just R&R the caps, which is probably why his estimate seemed high, if it was Bill (but you already told us that Bill declined the job, so maybe not Bill).

Thanks for your confidence in my abilities, redglobe, but even with a very generous conception of possibility, I'm not sure I can envision a world in which "You could perform the work yourself" is true of me. I tried to make interconnects once and all I managed to do was melt the pins of the connectors. If I were to try again, I would certainly take Lew's advice and get a decent station as my previous disaster was not all user error (I want to believe).

Yes, Lew, it was Bill and it was a quote for my technics and not the victor. It did include other things but since I didn't ask for those other things, I assumed it all came as a package. No matter. He fixed the technics w/o recapping and did so for a reasonable price, so I'm not complaining (quite the opposite in that case).

Resurrection complete.

After nearly a year of fruitless search for someone to fix my ailing Victor tt 101, I found the man of my audio dreams. His name is Dave Brown. I must have emailed 20-30 odd turntable repair shops and/or persons and had nothing to show for it until I found Dave’s cool website. He specializes in synthesizers (I think), but he’s a pro in the highest sense of the word, and took ‘all of’ 7 hours to diagnose and fix what others said was unfixable or too time consuming. He had never seen this turntable before, yet with service manual in hand he was able to do what seemed to me, and not just me, impossible. And yet he’s not a pro in the sense that he runs a shop (he used to, I believe); he now does repairs out of interest and by request only. He initially declined, citing the difficulty of accessing the victor’s circuit boards while powering the motor (a well grounded concern it turns out), but I’m a good beggar ☺.

On my understanding of what he told me, the boards used on the victor are ‘eyelet boards’. The solder connections through such boards tended to suffer cracking. This is what happened to mine. Some of the connections are heat sensitive, and that’s why I experienced the partial resurrection a few weeks back after leaving the unit on. The cracking is not necessarily evident to the naked eye, but after resoldering the boards, the table now works flawlessly. It should be noted that changing the power supply capacitors didn’t fix any of my troubles, but some of them appeared to be leaking so it was a good idea to do so.

He warns that not all is repairable: if the quartz clock responsible for the pitch control is broken, then most likely you have a doorstop.

So, in regards to that, there is some danger in living with this direct drive table, but the world is made less dangerous with Dave in it.

Gotta go find that Mahler now.