Magazine & Gripper Motors, Part 1

When we picked-up the RO in West Virginia I had to prepare it for shipping back to Minnesota....on it's back. And in order to do this, amongst other things I had to remove all of the records. And in order to do that, I knew I had to turn the Magazine Assembly via the Magazine Motor. Simple enough to do, given that there's a spring-loaded/momentary Load Switch inside the cabinet....

Except when I powered-up the unit (with the amplifier disconnected, of course!) and hit this switch, the motor had a pretty hard time turning the carousel! "Ok....", I thought. "I guess I'm going to have to look into rebuilding this motor".

That was 7 years ago.

Fast forward to Present Day, and here's that same motor loosened-up and laying on it's side:

And I guess I got a case of the "May As Well's", as I decided this would be the perfect time to remove the Gripper Arm motor and go through it as well:

Thankfully both motors "smelled" ok (not burned), and both gears turned when I rotated the stub of the armature sticking out of the end of the motor, but they didn't turn all that easy, and they felt a little "scratchy", even when turning them slowly.....

Disassembly was pretty straight forward, and nothing broke, thank God! The most important thing to do at this point was to keep everything in order, as I found that some of the parts are not interchangeable between the two assemblies.

Here's an "expanded" (never say "exploded"!) view of the Magazine motor:

The Gripper motor is quite similar, except for some minor differences with shafts and gears.

Once I had both motors disassembled I found all sorts of dried-up, baked-on, caked-on, and just generally nasty-looking grease that had attached itself to anything it could! Cleaning it up from the metal pieces was simple enough, as I could go at it with a sharp pick, a wire brush, and some degreaser, but these plastic gears....Uh-uh! No way!

Since I don't know what the original grease was, and I don't know what chemicals would "craze" the plastic gears, I ended-up cleaning each one by hand, in the laundry tub, with a dental pick, a toothbrush, and Soft Soap! Scrape, wipe, brush, wash. Repeat ad infinitum. Each gear took about an hour to get thoroughly and completely clean, but as you will see in the next post, I was able to get them to "squeaky clean" condition!

And thankfully not one tooth was broken-off from either gear.

The bearings on both ends of both motors had a grinding feel to them, which may help explain some of the difficulties I had turning the magazine motor back in 2010. So, thinking that they were a "standard bearing", and that they could easily be replaced at the local NAPA store, I promptly removed them, paying particular attention to the number and overall thickness of spacers used on the ends of each armature:

It was only after I had the bearings in-hand that I found they weren't a "standard" size after all! Oh, sure! They both had what "looked like" standard bearing numbers, but when I put a micrometer on the smaller of them (the "lower" bearing) and found an inside dimension of 6.35 mm....while every other bearing with the same P/N I could find on the "interwebs" had an ID of 6.00 mm, I figured I was screwed!

Ah! But then I remembered that Jukebox World/Stamann Musikboxen  (http://www.jukebox-world.de/en/home/) offers all sorts of hard-to-find jukebox parts, and if I was ever lucky....

Success! All 4 bearings! I couldn't hit the Purchase button fast enough!

While the bearings were being shipped from Germany I took the armatures over to Schelen-Gray in St. Paul (http://www.grayautoelectric.com/) to have them checked-out. And if everything was ok, I would have them turned.

Thankfully everything turned-out just fine.

The last thing I wanted to do before re-assembly was clean the motor housings thoroughly, both inside and out, as they look all nasty, and I didn't want this crap getting on my new bearings and nice, clean, and newly turned armatures!

Except how did I clean them without getting the windings wet, you ask? The answer to that will have to wait until the next post!