A Kuzma Stogi counterweight service:


This year my Kuzma Stabi turntable and my Kuzma Stogi tonearm will have their 10 year birthday. During this time they never caused me any problem, being faithful and honest workers. One of this day I went to perform a cartridge weight fine tuning, but discovered that the Stogi counterweight was blocked! That is to say, that the external part of the counterweight (with the red dots to count the weight) was turning, but the internal part of the same was blocked and doesn't move along the arm pivot.

I immediately wrote to Kuzma asking help, but unfortunately for me he was in Las Vegas for the CES hi-fi Show. When he finally came back he answered how to solve the problem. Here is the description, so that if some of you will have a similar problem, you know what to do by yourself. The bad news is that to do a better job you have to unmount the tonearm from the table and, of course, you have to unmount the cartridge from the tonearm. You know how much time does it take to mount a cartridge with a good alignment...

In order to unmount the tonearm from the Stabi turntable you have to turn out the two screw fixing the tonearm cable below the table. That is because the Kuzma tonearm have the cable going straight from the cartridge pins to the phono preamplifier RCA sockets. Once the cable is free you can unscrew the wooden arm base fixed on the four corners. If the back-left screw is too close to the tonearm consider to use a tilted Torx T30 tool instead that the normal Allen Key, as shown in the picture here.

When the arm base is free you can take it out with the tonearm and cable and then turn out the three screw fixing the arm from below. Now that you have the free tonearm you can start the difficult part of the job, that is to unblock the counterweight. The trick is to insert an Allen key in the holes of the internal part of the counterweight and apply with one hand a hard (but “controlled”) strength to make it rotate while holding the arm fixed with the other hand. At the beginning you can turn it in both directions, trying to warm the solidified grease. When you see that it starts to turn, you have to patiently turn it clockwise (looking from the headshell) until all the counterweight comes out from the arm pivot.






Note the Allen key inserted in one of the three holes used to fix the counterweight position.



When the counterweight is out you can start to... clean the solidified green grease from the pivot and the counterweight thread using a soft paper, a brush and some unblocking spray. When you are satisfied of removing the dirt then you can add a drop of Kuzma bearing oil and remount the counterweight, which will fly fast as oil above water!



OK, you have lost some time with this wok but consider that you will have also the opportunity to replace the oil inside the bearing hole and to realign perfectly your cartridge. After 10 years of hard work could you deny to your beloved turntable/tonearm combo such a care?








Tino © January 2009