Creative and cheap DIY turntable/tonearm tweaks

Adding any material to your tonearm cavities will significantly change the effective mass of the arm. Be careful. Sand is completely out of the question. Also, it is not true that "the more acoustically dead, the better". There must be a balance struck between damping and "liveliness" or your music will be dead. This is not something for a newbie to be fussing with, unless you have money to burn.

The Teres 255 platter has the chambers filled with lead shot. Adding a liquid has been thought of, and it is a problem with sealing the chambers against leaks.

I have done a number of mods to arms and tables. Search the archives for my threads on mods.

http://www.audioasylum.com/index.html

Go to Audio Asylum, click on the vinyl discussions, and pose your question there. There are a lot of do it yourself, and down right cheap things that can be done to improve things. Also, not all the people here advise spending huge bucks for things. I've found quite a few of them that are downright helpful, some have sent me things for nothing, and many have taken the time to be helpful. Every forum has those that tell you to "sell your crappy stuff and buy what I have" Stay away from them.

As you suggested,I went back and read one of your threads on tonearm tweaks which discussed adding lead fishing weights protruding from the vertical axis. I am not an audio expert but I did study college physics enought to make me wonder that such a small weight attached so close to the axis could have a measureable effect. Did you actually calculate the change in resistance to angular momentum that would result from this to determine its significance? It seems to me that a much longer outrigger arm would be needed such as a rigid wire attached perpendicular to the arm with the weights at the end. Inertia would increase in proportion to distance of weight from the pivot point.

My question concerning sand in the arm, which you said was "out of the question" would also increase the inertia of the arm and with proper counter weighting, would be indistinguishable, in terms of the physics, from your outrigger,in the horizontal dimension. It would also increase inertia in the vertical direction. (But there may be other reasons why sand in the arm is a bad idea).
It seems to me more physics is need here. It is interesting to hear that someone is "blow away" by a tweak but the audio press is full of too much of this hype to give it credibility without solid analytical justification.