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?
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.
