Replacing Maxon motor in a Teres Verus

I reached out to Chris, but thought I’d take it out to the hive mind. Part number looks the same, but “simple” part swaps like this never end up as simple as it seems. 

Did yours die? I would hate to be without mine. Doubt I will ever be able to find anything better than my table. Certainly not that I could ever afford!

It’s started to make a clicking / grinding noise. I pulled the motor out of the housing, and confirmed it is the motor. Just want to confirm there’s nothing special / custom about the motor. 

BTW, I’ve marveled at your table for years. I have a solid acrylic platter w/ a Cocobolo base. I’d love to find a lead-loaded platter. 

Chris says the bearings may just need cleaning and lube, but will let me know if the motor actually needs to be replaced. I’m going to ship it back to him for a once-over. I’ll report back if he finds anything more serious / interesting. 

BTW, I’ve marveled at your table for years. I have a solid acrylic platter w/ a Cocobolo base. I’d love to find a lead-loaded platter.

Chris came up and did a demo here in the Seattle area one time. With his great table design he was able to swap platters letting you hear only the difference the platter made. No other turntable I know of is this even possible. Learned so much thanks to his modular design. Anyway, he went through three or four of them. Each step up the improvements were clear and obvious and across the board. 

The next logical step up for mine would be the solid black platter. Quite a bit better but cost more too and then there was the problem of being solid black. Almost always I go for sound over all but in this case the lead shot platter on my carbon fiber table just looks so good! The photo on site is old. Today with the Origin Live Conqueror and Verus motor it looks ten times better.

The Miller Carbon was built back when I was the only one in the NW selling Black Diamond Racing. Figured, build a table out of BDR Shelf, got to be good. Took a bit of work but totally worth every minute. Chris himself had a listen one night, towards the end of the evening he noticed one of his favorite reference LP's so we had a listen. Forget his exact words but he was very favorably impressed.

Besides the BDR there are a couple bearing mods. Chris used a stainless steel ball bearing on a teflon coated thrust plate. The teflon wears through in no time, SS and the brass thrust plate, neither of them are very hard and start to wear down. Bearing that was dead silent on the teflon, noise begins to creep in. Not much. You don't notice it until its gone. But its there.

So I replaced the thrust bearing with a cutter head piece supplied for free from a local machine shop. Forget the details but its sky high Rockwell hard and sits on the bottom real nice. Then bought some silicon carbide (? l think it was) ball bearings. A few weeks ago I pulled the bearing to change the oil and these materials are so hard that after 10 years there's only the tiniest dot of wear on the thrust bearing and no visible wear at all on the ball bearing.

The Teres bearing itself, the only wear was hairlines running around the spindle, probably some dust or something got in there. So light I wiped by hand with some NevRDull and it disappeared.

If you look at the table from the side, the round shape just below the plinth is a piece of Shelf cut and threaded into a great big nut. Because the nut is so big it can be tightened by hand. The entire threaded area of the bearing is thus encased in that ultra stiff and damped BDR Shelf material.
http://www.theanalogdept.com/c_miller.htm
So more there than meets the eye. Glad to hear you like it.

Cheers!