PVA (white wood glue) will probably work just fine on the Oasis foam. You can bond PVA to metal if you prime the metal with a sealer coat of 5 parts water 1 part PVA and let dry. Then use the PVA full strength for the glue line between the Oasis and the metal head shell. Any additional surface roughness you can provide say with light sand paper will help bonding a lot. If you are bonding to the under side of the head shell then there is no cosmetic issue.
You might consider saturating the Oasis with a damping compound after it is bonded in place. Silicone fluid might be a good starting point. A thick fluid will be absorbed by the foam and should stay more or less in place. Just a suggestion.
You might consider saturating the Oasis with a damping compound after it is bonded in place. Silicone fluid might be a good starting point. A thick fluid will be absorbed by the foam and should stay more or less in place. Just a suggestion.
Slightly compressed EVA foam...
which is basically foam underlay for hardwood/laminate. The stuff I have is blue. Also I will try a small shaved piece of rigid pink insulation, some EAR product (low density E.A.R. ear plugs), and perhaps my fave, BB
.
Someplace I have some Oasis and will try that too. I will attempt to quantify the results.
which is basically foam underlay for hardwood/laminate. The stuff I have is blue. Also I will try a small shaved piece of rigid pink insulation, some EAR product (low density E.A.R. ear plugs), and perhaps my fave, BB
.Someplace I have some Oasis and will try that too. I will attempt to quantify the results.
rigid pink
Been way to busy for a few days now so little new to comment on but rigid pink insulation foam grabbed my fancy. Have a bunch of leftovers from a real insulation project so between chores grabbed a piece to play with for a few minutes. Cut a sliver with a razor blade about the size of the balsa wood isolator. It cuts real easy and nicely. Sands well to dimension and is very resistant to the kind of minor damage that destroys Oasis. Put the little piece between similar sized bits of hardwood and tried tapping it. Seems pretty dead. So there is hope that it will be a good material. Meanwhile over lunch break I put on one of my favorite records. Jean Pierre Rampal's "suite for jazz flute". This in an incredible recording especially if you are a flute player, which I am. With the balsa wood sandwich isolator for the tone arm and a real sandwich for my lunch I settled back. So here is my first report of a real listen. The sound of the recording and the flute, was the very best I've heard to date, MAGIC. Same for the rest of the instruments, piano and drums. Like they were there in front of me. Now I know what is meant by "air" around the players. Most important was the musical phrasing which was easily perceived. Little nuances in breathing, tone, attack, dynamics came across so clearly. Never had I heard this record this way before. Mind you, my system is not bad at all, but not good like this. MAGIC!
This is but one highly subjective report of one listening experience. It may all go some other way should my stomach be out of sorts or Mal De Mere set in. The thing that amazes me most about these experiments with building a Schroeder clone tone arm is that so much improvement can be wrung out of two components that were already very good (arm and cartridge), and that very ordinary electronics and speaker could be able to reproduce that improvement. The electronics are an old Kenwood 30WPC receiver, home brew 7 inch isobarik woofers with good quality soft dome tweeters and mid-range, my Corian turntable and the Ortofon OM40 cartridge. Beats me whether what I'm hearing is "Hi End" audio or not, but I'm sure pleased. It would be interesting to see if the kind of improvement I've gotten with the tone arm project can be replicated with other parts of the chain. Guess that is what "DIY Audio" is all about.
Thanks DIYers,
BillG
which is basically foam underlay for hardwood/laminate. The stuff I have is blue. Also I will try a small shaved piece of rigid pink insulation, some EAR product (low density E.A.R. ear plugs), and perhaps my fave, BB
Someplace I have some Oasis and will try that too. I will attempt to quantify the results.
Been way to busy for a few days now so little new to comment on but rigid pink insulation foam grabbed my fancy. Have a bunch of leftovers from a real insulation project so between chores grabbed a piece to play with for a few minutes. Cut a sliver with a razor blade about the size of the balsa wood isolator. It cuts real easy and nicely. Sands well to dimension and is very resistant to the kind of minor damage that destroys Oasis. Put the little piece between similar sized bits of hardwood and tried tapping it. Seems pretty dead. So there is hope that it will be a good material. Meanwhile over lunch break I put on one of my favorite records. Jean Pierre Rampal's "suite for jazz flute". This in an incredible recording especially if you are a flute player, which I am. With the balsa wood sandwich isolator for the tone arm and a real sandwich for my lunch I settled back. So here is my first report of a real listen. The sound of the recording and the flute, was the very best I've heard to date, MAGIC. Same for the rest of the instruments, piano and drums. Like they were there in front of me. Now I know what is meant by "air" around the players. Most important was the musical phrasing which was easily perceived. Little nuances in breathing, tone, attack, dynamics came across so clearly. Never had I heard this record this way before. Mind you, my system is not bad at all, but not good like this. MAGIC!
This is but one highly subjective report of one listening experience. It may all go some other way should my stomach be out of sorts or Mal De Mere set in. The thing that amazes me most about these experiments with building a Schroeder clone tone arm is that so much improvement can be wrung out of two components that were already very good (arm and cartridge), and that very ordinary electronics and speaker could be able to reproduce that improvement. The electronics are an old Kenwood 30WPC receiver, home brew 7 inch isobarik woofers with good quality soft dome tweeters and mid-range, my Corian turntable and the Ortofon OM40 cartridge. Beats me whether what I'm hearing is "Hi End" audio or not, but I'm sure pleased. It would be interesting to see if the kind of improvement I've gotten with the tone arm project can be replicated with other parts of the chain. Guess that is what "DIY Audio" is all about.
Thanks DIYers,
BillG
In this project I would probably try to apply 6061 aluminum machined to a truncated tetrahedral profile .030" thick max at the cart/headshell interface area and almost sharp at the rectangular edges of the damping material interface. I'd probably perforate it outside the mounting area with small diameter holes and heat treat until extremely brittle. Then, somehow I'd try to make a thin slice of RTOM Moon Gel and put it between the plates and use a pair of silicone O rings of appropriate dimension to bias them together. Complicated, hard. Such is the problem of high performance. Don't ask me how I'd bolt the plates to the cart and headshell.
One can hardly call this type of mounting a "headshell". It has been used by WTA and many other arms. A simple solid extension to the arm tube which is slotted to permit longitudinal and rotational adjustment of a cross piece. The cross piece is drilled to attach the cartridge with screws. The cross piece is drilled and tapped midway between the cartridge mounting screws. A screw then goes through the slotted part into the tapped hole in the cross piece. In the original configuration the crosspiece is solid aluminum.
What I have done is to make a new cross piece in the form of a three piece sandwich. The outer layers are thin slabs of wood. The inner layer is some vibration damping material. I intend to use a thin slab of damping insulating foam (pink stuff) when I get to it, but for the summer I'm still using the original piece of balsa wood. The inner layer is perforated so that the mounting screw doesn't contact it. The screw is simply threaded into an undersized hole in the top layer. Now taking a line from the English cartridge isolator I glued the cartridge to the underside of the three layer cross piece. I think I use a small dab of Super Glue ( cyanoacrylate). That's all there is to it. When necessary the glue will give way with sufficient pressure and can be cleaned of with a razor knife. BTW, the three layers are held together with a bit more of the Super Glue
I've not done much listening over the summer for press of other pursuits but when I have, the balsa sandwich cartridge isolator has been giving great results. I'm not sure that substituting pink foam, or green, or blue, is going to make any difference at all. Hang in there for a while and we will find out.
Please, someone else out there, try this scheme too and let us know what you hear.
BillG
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