I have to apologize to any Empire 108 or 208 original fanatics who may be offended by this design/bastardization/re-interpretation. I assure you I/we went through a ton of mental iterations before it ended up being this "skeletal" design. I wanted to pay homage and make a top plate design with the shape of the original Empires and utilize a massive solid plinth, but truth be told, I was tiring of that design and I think there are other types of turntable designs that benefit more from that school of design. But that wonderful main bearing with the oil grooved spindle simply needed to be utilized in the best and simplest design we could come up with. One of Nate's design mandates, was to be able to use a 12" arm, and therefore anything similar in proportion to the original plinth was not really an option.
So we indirectly ended up at this design. Nate also wanted his table to be able to accept a Linn arm he has, so his second arm pod is ready to have that arm bolted on as well.
Nate piqued my curiosity when he mentioned he might be interested in offering up one 208 if I were to make double the number of parts so he could have one of whatever creation bubbled to the surface. Since I had been watching for an Empire for a long time with little success, this had my design juices flowing almost immediately. So there are actually two of these exact machines out there, I gave the other to a close friend for his hardcore plunge back into analog. So Nate provided the impetus and undying support and faith necessary for a successful project like this. They took about 5 months to make because I had to work through a few invention ideas in the process (neither of which worked out I might add). But the brass platter weights were an accident, and I never intended for it to be so Gyrodek-esque. But in frustration after a failed attempt at a dynamic physical speed control design I've been perfecting for a while, I just plain bolted the weights to one of the platters and it was so utterly fantastic at damping, we abandoned all other plans for resonance damping of the horribly ringy stock platters (epoxy based damping, mass, etc. were planned but deemed unnecessary).
The motor pod is simply a more modern material based isolation, with an eye kept towards functionality which was at least as good as the rather functionally elegant original arrangement. But as quiet as the Papst motor is, it simply needed to be isolated from the main bearing and tonearm, and passe as that design has become. We had considered a DC based motor pod, but it would have continued to stray so far from the original design, that sacrificing two stock 208's would have been sacrilege and just plain bad taste. To be fair though, they were Nate's to do with as he pleased, and he wanted his table to have some cool factor as well. I hope we succeeded.
I have one more revision for the footer assemblies, a design I tested last week on the other one of these tables. So I'll be machining up some discs for Nate's which help with the stabilization and leveling abilities of these decks. The other deck already has them and I'm very happy with the improvement in both performance and functionality. With that slight change, these two twins are complete. :wave: