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Maintenance for arms with detachable headshells

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I've had about nine vintage tonearms with detachable headshells and currently have five of them on my two turntables..
Raven
Victor TT-101
I have had some problems with cartridge/headshell combinations on one of my Fidelity Research FR-66S arms on the Raven since I first acquired it nearly five years ago.
The left channel would disappear with certain cartridges in certain headshells and I returned a couple of headshells in the belief that they were the problem..?
Sometimes tightening the bayonet screw on the tonearm against the headshell would restore the left channel and I have lived with this condition until recently when I read on a Forum that the contacts within the tonearm were spring-loaded....!
I stuck a plastic chopstick down the throat of one of my arms and felt the 'spring' pushbacks on the four individual contactors.
Emboldened by this...I sprayed WD40 into the recalcitrant FR-66S and pushed the chopstick against the springs several times and then inserted the FR-7f integral head cartridge which had also recently 'lost' its left channel...
Voila...miraculous recovery..😎🎼❗️
I then adopted the same procedure for all my other vintage tonearms.

Apart from restoring all proper functionality to my headshell/cartridge combinations....the improvement in sound quality was not being imagined.
Clarity, transparency, delicacy and 'power' seemed to have been enhanced.
So for those of you who enjoy the benefits of interchangeable headshell tonearms...whip out the WD40 and a chopstick and free-up those sticking springs 😍
128x128halcro
czarivey
5,946 posts
 
Deoxit is less toxic to use indoors vs WD40, but if deoxit doesn't help, I'd also use WD.
swampwalker's avatar
swampwalker
5,138 posts
 
Hey, now that I've learned something today, maybe I'll take the rest of the day off to listen to some tunes. Great advice, Halcro, but you might need to be careful w the WD-40. It can get gummy and also capture dust. I don't have such an arm, but if I did, I would modify your advice and substitute contact cleaner which is very volatile. It might need to be applied more often but I think that the WD-40 could be a problem in the long term.
pryso
1,933 posts
 
Thanks Halcro. But doesn't WD-40 leave behind a film? Obviously it helped in your situation but I'd be more inclined to use an electronic switch cleaner.

So I guess I'm with Swampwalker on this.
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