For Nottingham Owners

Posted by bcowen (A) on September 17, 2016 at 06:29:14

First off, I love my Nottingham Ace Space 'table and arm. While it's certainly not anywhere near the upper echelon of analog rigs (in fact, it's in the lower end of the high end price-wise), it simply plays music without any glaring deficiencies or sonic attributes. However, I've had 2 irritations with the tonearm ever since I've had it. One is the mounting scheme of the armpost, which has enough play in it to cause the arm to be cocked one way or the other when the setscrews are tightened. That's been fixed with Pete Riggle's VTAF device. One down. The other (and a big one) is the lack of azimuth adjustment. What I've read here and there is that you can (with enough force) just twist the headshell in the armwand. I've tried that with mine more than once, but cannot get it to budge with any amount of torque I'm comfortable with. Beyond that, such a brute force method will not easily allow for fine adjustment. Then I read somewhere that instead of the headshell, you can twist the counterweight holder on the armwand. As the Ace-Space arm is technically a unipivot, this method would work except for the same problem -- I can't get mine to budge.

Then as I was re-mounting the Koetsu the other day and needed some added weight at both ends of the tonearm to increase the effective mass, I stumbled across this by accident. Haven't seen it mentioned elsewhere so thought I'd share it: adding a blob of heavy putty to the inside of the brass counterweight causes a shift in the weight's center of gravity depending on its' rotation in the holder. Twisting the weight clockwise or counterclockwise will cause the arm to tilt in the opposite direction correspondingly, and suddenly easy (and fine) azimuth adjustment is possible. I used some tungsten putty scavenged from the dusty Pinewood Derby toolbox - very heavy, moldable, and tacky enough to stay in place. Works like a charm, and I can now get identical L/R channel readings on the Fozgometer easily and repeatably.

Tungsten Putty (Open in New Window)

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Topic - For Nottingham Owners - bcowen 06:29:14 09/17/16 (9)

RE: For Nottingham Owners - Mick Wolfe 09:51:03 09/17/16 (0)

RE: For Nottingham Owners - -æ- 07:59:09 09/17/16 (5)

RE: For Nottingham Owners - bcowen 08:11:00 09/17/16 (4)

RE: For Nottingham Owners - -æ- 08:35:20 09/17/16 (3)

RE: For Nottingham Owners - bcowen 13:23:18 09/17/16 (2)

RE: For Nottingham Owners - -æ- 15:40:22 09/17/16 (1)

RE: For Nottingham Owners - Jack D II 21:36:20 09/19/16 (0)

RE: For Nottingham Owners - jbcortes 07:45:20 09/17/16 (1)

RE: For Nottingham Owners - volunteer 07:47:28 09/17/16 (0)

For Nottingham Owners

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