Last winter I bought an ar-xa from someone on audiogon. When it arrived I unpacked it to find that the arm was broken and unusable so I decided to rebuild it. I bought some 1X3 oak glued them up, put a new arm on it and this is the result. The arm (adc) was a bit hard to get into the right spot, I ended up making a small armboard out of 1/4" carbon fiber that I had in my garage (really tough to drill). The motor is upgraded 24 pole 3 watts. The deck is painted with stone spray paint and then a couple layers of clear cote. There's no dust cover and the base is left open. Looks ok for a cheap table. And last but not lease I was able to sell the old headshell, instruction manual, arm/counterweight and the plastic scale for measure the stylus pressure for more than I paid for the table.


[/URL]http://www3.sympatico.ca/kenp2/kenp/arxa.JPG

Nice job there Ken! That stone paint looks great too. This is the kind of story we want to see in DIY. C'mon guys!

Rob

I like it too. Makes me wish I should have tinkered with my old Yammie instead of giving it away. Good job, KenP :D .
Brad

Wow nice!!

Looks good I like that stone paint good idea. How did you figure out where to but the arm for the correct geometry???

Rob2:)

I had one of those protractors for the stylus position, put that on the center spindle and worked back from there. I drilled the hole in the carbon fibre oversized so that I'd have some room for small adjustment.

Can you post some more pics of the arm and tell us a bit more about how you did it?

I'll do better than that, tomorrow I'm going to take it apart to add some damping to the underside of the deck and to the aluminum suspension components. I'll take some pics and clean it up a bit more

You're a pretty modest guy, Ken. Judging solely by the picture, that table turned out fabulous!

Please keep us 'in the know' about how it sounds!

Jay:cool:

I cut off the well for the arm leaving as much of the original sub-chassis as possible then bolted two small rectangles of carbon fibre to the sub-chassis. The new arm had to go further over than the old one and it also has a height adjustment on it. It may not be pretty but itwasn't too hard to do and it works. I'd be interested to know how Merrill used to do this mod, does anyone know? I now have to wait to hear it because my amp crapped out on me. Getting a new-old one b&k st-140 which I won on Ebay.

http://www3.sympatico.ca/kenp2/kenp/arxa2.JPG http://www3.sympatico.ca/kenp2/kenp/arxa3.JPG http://www3.sympatico.ca/kenp2/kenp/arxa4.JPG

Ken would you mind telling me what you paid for the AR-XA turntable? The reason i ask is theres one available to me and I'd like to know what their value really is. The upgraded 3 watt 24 pole motor and power supply is also available to me.

Mike

The one that I bought was in very good condition (before it arrived here) with all documentation, dust cover in good condition and gram scale. It was $75 on audiogon. I've seen them go for a high of $140 and low of $40 on ebay. If you look at the table by todays standards it's really not very good, arm is substandard with no anti-scate, no arm lifter, construction of the table is very lightweight and it's really kinda ugly. For $75 there are nicer turntables available.

Mike, I have 2 AR XA's, both from eBay. I paid $50 for one (missing the AR logo & dustcover) and I paid $100 for the other (complete in original box, with AR logo, dustcover and all the accessories).

Both were BIN auctions, but you will see them go for $50 from time to time on eBay but they usually go for a little more.

Dave