I currently own seven Empires, 2, 398's 3, 598 III's 2, 698's and a custom 598 with a modified SME 3009 tonearm to fit the stock Empire mount.
I did kind of the same thing. A friend who has a friend who owns a machine shop made the hole in the t-bar big enough to accept the SME arm. I had to alter the SME arm in a few other ways, but the results have been very worth it!
I will post some information on the 598 arm from taking apart a damaged arm after salvaging the cueing parts and the headshell.. What I can say now, is...... DO NOT!! try to take apart a 598 arm, all of the bearings are press fit, and held in with redundant and heavy retaining rings that take special tools to remove. Just about everything on this arm say's factory repair only! The only things you can safely remove are the counter weight and the cueing parts.
I second this! I successfully took apart and repaied my own stock 990 arm, but it was a "nothing to lose, everything to gain" situation. One gratifying thing was I found that the horizontal race bearings are a stock, common item so I was able to pick up two new bearings from my local hardware store. Oddly enough, the cuing on the 990 arms I've had never posed a problem.
Also, in one of my other hobbies I do molding and casting of poly resin parts. I an going to try to replicate the cartridge clip, but upgrade it to a no solder wire connector using a brass pin the will make contact to the arm as normal but able to slip the headshell wire on it like a normal headshell. I did a repair of a headshell with a damaged contact by removing the damaged contact, and filling the hole with JB weld, and redrilling to hole to fit a modified brass round head nail, and it works perfect.
THIS sounds really promising. I hope you can do this.
Lastly, the big wall I have hit on researching Empire tables, is the dead end at 1980. What happened to the turntable division? I know the cartridge line went to Benz, but what happened to the last tables, the spare parts, the tooling etc. It's like they all fell into a vortex in 1980.
In retrospect, Empire was an odd company from all I gathered over the years. I grew up in Brooklyn, not too far away from their Garden City location and I remember going there with my Uncle in about 1977 to try and get his 98 arm fixed. Even though I was only about 12, I could sense an atmosphere of tension there. (They kept it for about a month, then said they couldn't fix it. I fiddled with it later and found out my Uncle inadvertently reversed two of the leads in the headshell to the new cartridge he installed causing the problem. I think the repair people at Empire didn't even look at it.)
Plus it was impossible to find a dealer in the NYC area that carried the 698, despite it being a current model. Whenever my Uncle went looking...cash in hand...all he got were sniffs of disapproval and tried to steer him to other brands and models. This despite glowing test results from all the magazines. Eventually he found a dealer in NYC that special ordered it for him. It was hard finding their cartridges as well. Everyone only wanted to sell Stanton/Pickering and Shure. Never Empire, despite their aggressive advertising.
It got so bad, the only place you could get replacement belts in the late seventies were from Lyle Cartridges of Brooklyn NY.
I can only infer from all this that Empire must have been difficult to deal with on many levels. The Stereophile article I referenced above quoted Benz as saying how the factory wasn't very well maintained, with worn out machinery and a workforce that he implied was set in their ways and resentful of any attempts to modernize or increase production. Make of it what you will.
As to spare parts, they had 'em up to about 1990, though not for everything. I would assume all the tooling and machinery went into the dumpster after they moved from Garden City to Deer Park NY. When that happened I don't know, though I'm guessing it had to be after Benz cut his losses and closed down the NY factory entirely.
