Some free time this weekend - SME 3009/IIi rewire

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mamsterla

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Some free time this weekend - SME 3009/IIi rewire
« on: 27 Jan 2003, 11:27 pm »
So what do you do while watching the super bowl?  Well rewire your SME 3009/IIi of course.

I had been reading about the improvements that could be made to this venerable arm by eliminating the yucko SME 4-pin connector and wiring straight from the phono cart to the plugs on the phono stage.

I bought 3 ft. of Discovery tonearm wire and two Cardas GRCM RCA connectors from TakeFive Audio.  I also bought some gold plated female serial port pins from Fry's.

Over time I had read rewiring the SME varied from a piece of cake to something that should not be undertaken by mere mortals.  Being foolish, I decided to try my mid-level skills at this task.

So the first thing I did, was remove the pin connector at the bottom of the arm.  Hmm.  Those SME wires are really tiny and brittle too.  I removed the headshell and did not see the knot in the wires and broke the originals.  No big deal since I had the discovery wires, but not part of the original plan.  I then removed the arm from the bearing and unscrewed the counterweight assembly.  I then made a mistake that I would not realize until reassebly.  I unscrewed the knife bearing from the arm - I turns out that the screw for this holds in the ground wire for the arm tube.  More about this later.

The old wires slid out without a problem and then I inspected the arm.  There was no balsa wood or filling that other people mentioned.  It's just a chromed thin walled tube with a bend in it.

I taped the end of the Discovery wire and threaded it from the bottom of the arm out to the tube.  I had to lift the arm off the bearing seat to thread it through the arm - the ground wire was a little in the way.  During the course of this, I broke the ground wire, so I used one of the other wires (blue) from the SME bundle to rewire that too.  Soldering was easier than I expected - I used a 3rd hand and magnifier to do it.  The really hard part was screwing the knife bearing onto the arm again.

This took more dexterity than 2 hands could easily provide.  One has to hold a tiny ground tab steady while putting the bearing over it blindly and then screwing it in with a tiny screw.  That took me about 45 minutes I think.

Once that was complete, the soldering of the pins to the wire was easy - I carefully stripped the wires using a razor blade and cut at an angle into my thumb nail - worked better than it sounds.

The soldering of the RCAs and reattachment of the counterweight was simple and I got everything back together pretty quickly, though too late to do much listening.

A quick listen this morning reveals some better detail, but I think it will take a little time to burn in.  I noticed that the Discovery wire reduced the anti-skate adjustment that I liked the clean path direct to the phono stage.  I will report on this more after I do some mods to the TT next.

I just thought people would be interested in hearing about the process.

-MA