OK there is only one place locally which does repairs & the reviews on google are pretty bad. Couldn't I just get a whole new turntable? Pretty confident I could handle the replacement job myself ...

Right - do you know how I would go about locating a local service tech?
in
Boise - Idaho
?

Because it would be awesome if I didn't have to ship it anywhere...

I bought a Magnavox Astro-Sonic stereo counsel a few years back. I heard the sound on it and was blown away. It worked perfectly when I bought it, but after playing records for ~6 hours a day for a year the auto drop broke. But that is not the real problem since the manual play still works fine. The...