Greetings,
For awhile now I've been planning out a DIY tonearm. So far, a unipivot has seemed the best choice given my limited access to machining tools. However, the instability of unipivots has always bothered me. The standard ways that most manufacturers get around this, throwing a really low counterweight on, and giving the arm a high center of gravity, feel like sloppy workarounds.
So I've been dreaming about building an arm with a relatively high center of gravity, which would pretty much be free to tilt in any direction, and using magnets in some way to stabilize its movement. Graham does this with his newest tonearm, and its supposed to work very well. I think Grahams approach is out of my league right now given the tools I have, and copying his idea isnt in the spirit of DIY.
Recently, I stumbled upon an old patent in which a tonearm uses 2 opposing magnets to float arong a central shaft. While I don't want to copy this idea exactly, it inspired me to see if I cold use part of the idea. I've done a few drawings to show you what I mean:
For awhile now I've been planning out a DIY tonearm. So far, a unipivot has seemed the best choice given my limited access to machining tools. However, the instability of unipivots has always bothered me. The standard ways that most manufacturers get around this, throwing a really low counterweight on, and giving the arm a high center of gravity, feel like sloppy workarounds.
So I've been dreaming about building an arm with a relatively high center of gravity, which would pretty much be free to tilt in any direction, and using magnets in some way to stabilize its movement. Graham does this with his newest tonearm, and its supposed to work very well. I think Grahams approach is out of my league right now given the tools I have, and copying his idea isnt in the spirit of DIY.
Recently, I stumbled upon an old patent in which a tonearm uses 2 opposing magnets to float arong a central shaft. While I don't want to copy this idea exactly, it inspired me to see if I cold use part of the idea. I've done a few drawings to show you what I mean: