Vintage DD turntables. Are we living dangerously?

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.

JVC QL-10
Someone in the US got lucky today.
Hopefully he might contribute here?
This one looks like a beauty?

Banquo, If, God forbid, you ever do have a problem with the quartz clock or any other unobtainium ICs that may be lurking in the circuit, you are not necessarily out of luck. If Victor was anything like Technics, you will find that some of the individual parts of this type were also used in lesser models, often available at much lower cost vs the TT101. Thus you can probably find a lower level Victor to use as a parts mule for your TT101, if push comes to shove.

Henry, This time I emphatically agree with you; someone got a steal on that TT101.