Thank you for the advise. I purchased a beautiful Pioneer PL-150 II a few days ago along with a pair of AR 4x's. The turntable works beautifully so I'm quite happy about that.
I have been messing around with the spindle as I've had time this week. Letting it soak submerged in penetrating oil for about 2 days did absolutely nothing. So, figuring I didn't have too much left to lose, I got out the mallet and started to gently hit the bottom of the spindle. Slowly but surely, it came out of the spider. It turns out there's no bearing in there at all. The spider just acts as a bushing against the spindle, and the cheap grease they put in there hardened over the years. So I let it soak for a few days in oil and then cleaned it all off with some steel wool. Just an hour ago I reassembled the entire unit and I'm testing it now and running into some more problems...
1. The most major one is that the left channel seems to be nonexistent; there's just no sound.
2. I'm concerned I may have bent the spindle while removing it from the spider because the whole platter is off kilter. Is there a way to adjust this? I really didn't hit it too hard, so I tend to doubt it's bent.
3. The automatic stop doesn't work. This was happening before I even disassembled it.
I would like to try to solve some of these problems, if possible. This is a nice cheap test unit for me to learn how these works and I wouldn't mind disassembling it again to figure out what's going on here.
Thank you again!
James
ps - Here's a photo album of all the pictures I've taken with annotations.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/V2QcZwF8vx7GeUUm6