Rowe AMI R86 turntable shaft / bearing

Neither of my service manuals diagram the bearing well for this machine. The turntable shaft has a concavity machined at bottom and the well ( or bearing holder) has what I always assumed was a drip hole, top bronze sleeve bearing is ok. Despite 5 yearly single oil drops, rotation slowed- cleaned and polished shaft, cleaned 32 years of gunk out of bearing well, now runs but: I question if there is meant to be a ball bearing, either stainless or delrin, as with some single play phonographs in that concavity as a thrust support. Don't want to ruin any thing at this point especially after recapping every board and tuning mech - hope to keep it going another 30 years. Any help appreciated. John Dawson

I am 99.44/100th% sure, that no ball bearing was used in this model---
Ron Rich

I don't ever remember a ball bearing in there.

Hello John,

I concur with the other posters that a ball bearing was not used on the turntable shaft of the R-84 through to the R-94 or for that matter in the earlier 1100/1200 mechanisms. In both cases bronze bearings were used.

If you have cleaned the bearing of old oil and the turntable shaft is not worn and slightly relubed then all should be well.

Although the bottom of the shat looks as if it would accept a ball at the bottom this would have not been the case because there was a speed change kit (automix kit) that was available for playing records at 33 1/3 RPM and a switch was fitted below the turntable shaft housing.

Personally I am not in favour of changing all the caps on the boards, I would change the smoothing caps on the amp but to be honest if it isn't broke why fix it and the caps you will have put in will be lucky to have a working life of not more than 5 to 8 years.

Regards
Alan

Alan Hood
ami-man
UK

Thank you all, finished taxes , will get back to juke now. Based on your opinions will leave bottom of shaft well as it was, original nylon spacer/washer no ball bearing. MAAS crème polished shaft nicely. I do agree that changing all caps probably not required, but after 30 years felt they might be time bombs, especially as unit had been stored by movers in a van over last summer (in Florida). As it was of 40 + board level caps only 2 were out of spec by > 50 % but two others showed ESR > 5 x norm. All in all not a bad showing. All were too low a voltage rating ( 50 volt max) to consider using my cap rejuvenator which only goes down to 100 volts. Hope you are being pessimistic about short service life of newer caps ( thinking grimly of all the bad motherboard caps I've had to replace recently). Hopefully Panasonic has fixed that chemistry problem. John