Oh no, all the balls fell out

Vinyl Asylum

Welcome Licorice Pizza (LP) lovers! Setup guides and Vinyl FAQ.

Oops, I decided to try to improve the performance of the Garrard tonearm on my Garrard 4HF table.
Luckily, I have one I purchased for spares, so I decided to try dismantling it first. This proved to be a good idea :-) It looked simple, I unsoldered the wires, and removed the single clamp-on piece of mechanism (used for the auto-stop)
Then I removed the circlip holding the tonarm's pivot shaft, and as soon as I moved the shaft up, all the ball-bearings fell out !!! The sit in a quarter race at the top, and are only held in by the shaft itself and the spacing washers on top of them.
So, questions to the guys with some experience in this area.
Are they normally held in place by light grease during re-assembly, or do you have to partially insert the shaft drop in the ball bearings, while carefully holding it horizontal until you slide the shaft all the way in and secure it with the circlip? Actually, are small ball-bearings like this normally oiled or greased?
If I need more ball-bearings, are they procurable? I haven't measured them, but they are only a millimetre or so in diameter.
...and lastly, to make me feel better, who else has lost their bearings this way?

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Topic - Oh no, all the balls fell out - ffrr 16:08:13 05/05/07 (4)

Don't feel too bad - texanater 06:19:18 05/06/07 (1)

re: gravity - ffrr 15:43:54 05/06/07 (0)

You are one lucky camper..... - tubesforever 23:10:13 05/05/07 (1)

Re: You are one lucky camper..... - ffrr 23:23:28 05/05/07 (0)

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