This one has a drooping counterweight, I may look at trying to fix it like you describe. If anyone happens to have a set of hinges laying around btw... Not a crack in the dust cover but also not a hinge in sight. And pretty proud of myself on this one, it had a dead channel and after some quite pain staking surgery was able to repair a broken wire in the tonearm. Put an Ortofon FF15XE that sounded horrible on my Dual in it and its actually not a bad sounding little table.