Need vintage idler drive help.

Try auction sites. I do see these idlers from time to time.

Johnantais, I'd like to here your thoughts and findings on plinth construction. Not so much the technical aspect but more the material. I understand the physics regarding mass absorbing vibrations but what I'd like more input on is the voodoo around the actual material used to make the plinth.

Shindo states after years of trial and error they've settled on a solid cherry plinth. Jeff Day with Terry Cain's help used a much thinner maple plinth. In the 6moons article, some of the emailed in pictures of other Garrard aficionados had plinths made of ebony, granite, etc. And of course they all report excellent sound... The only real constant I've heard is that mdf tends to deaden the sound. Living in Florida and having worked a fair bit with wood, I'm leaning more to the built up zero void baltic birch ply strictly from a stability standpoint. With the amount of moisture in the air, even with a/c I think it would be the most stable with maybe the exception of teak and that particular wood scares me as I believe it could easy impart a "dead" sound.

Thoughts?

Terry, I've tried all kinds of materials and all kinds of combinations and found they all dsounded pretty excellent, the only time I hear large differences in materials is when they are used as armboards which, I suppose, indicates that in large masses effects/sonic signatures are minimized. So, an MDF armboard usually sounds quite bad but not always, Corian, maple, oak and purpleheart all sounded quite good, birch-ply by itself was truly horrible, at least with the arm/cartridge I mounted to it. I would certainly stay away from pure MDF. With idler wheels anyway it's the torque which imparts their particular flavour (dynamics and bass predominant), and materials don't do much to harm this. Just for safety I would tend, and do in fact tend, to constrained-layer-damping, mixing materials to ensure no single resonant signature dominates, for neutrality and better damping/control. The best, most predfictable sound I've gotten so far is a humble mix of birch-ply and MDF in alternating layers. If you go to the trouble of marrying your top-plate via its underside to the plinth, which ensures a much larger level of silence, then I would recommend you do not marry it to MDF but instead to a layer of birch-ply, or whatever material sounds good (i.e. maple, Corian, oak, etc.). With CLD anyway the 'table has a good chance of sounding like it sounds, and not like the plinth sounds. Of course, I can't try every combination and so can't speak for the relative merits of pure cherrywood or pure maple, but I am very happy with the birch-ply/MDF combo, which with the Lenco anyway results in blinding speed, tremendous dynamics and bass, and by marrying directly to the plinth via the bottom of the top-plate, an utterly silent background. Good luck!