Technics SL-1500 capacitor and finicky switch repair

oldoverholt

New Member
Hey all! Long-time reader, haven't posted here in probably ten years...but have gotten a bit back into the vintage audio game recently and have been paying some much-needed attention to my Technics SL-1500.

For a long time the speed/on/off switch has been *very* finicky and you'd have to kind of wiggle it around to get a consistent or correct speed. I'd sprayed it with deoxit in the past but never really gave it a deep clean until this past week, which has helped immensely! When I took the switch apart it was covered in gunk so I gave it a good couple sprays of deoxit and wiped it down with a q-tip. Good as new!

The turntable was also speeding up or slowing down in the middle of playing a record every so often, so I figured I'd take a look at the circuit board while I had it open. I found that the C2 capacitor was blown and one of the leads wasn't even soldered onto the board anymore. The big C1 capacitor looked like it had a little bulge to it too so I figured I'd replace both of them. I put C1 on backwards the first time (doh) so I had to desolder and resolder it. I was a little worried about burning the circuit board too much and breaking it, but things turned out fine. I'd like to work up my confidence a bit and do a full recap, but this is my main (and only) turntable right now so I wanted to be a little cautious with it :).

The service manual from VinylEngine was a huge help with this too! The first time I put it back together I forgot to reconnect the motor to the circuit board and got really scared I broke things beyond repair. Luckily that was an easy fix lol.

 
Nice work. What cartridge you running?
Thanks! It's been fun to pick up soldering again and use it for useful stuff like this. Next project is attempting to fix a "for parts" Yamaha CR-440 I picked up on eBay. We'll see how that goes...

I've got a Shure M97 on it right now. It's at least a few years old (probably more tbh) at this point and I've been meaning to shop for something new... Any suggestions?

I've got it hooked up to a Yamaha CR-620 and KLH Model 22s fwiw.
 
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