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Category: Projects/DIY

Published: Thursday, 02 April 2015 22:16

 DIY: TECHNICS SL1200 EU TO US POWER CORD SWAP

THINGS YOU'LL NEED

• Wire Cutter / Wire Stripper
• Soldering Iron, Solder
• 2 Prong Polarized Power Cord
• Electric Drill (Or screw driver, but that can be difficult!)
• Exacto Knife
• Needle Noze Pliers 

 PREPARE THE NEW POWER CORD

To start with get your turntable at your work area. Now get your power cord. It should look something like this. You can actually salvage these off Walmart mini heat lamps!

Split the cable down the middle using your exacto knife, be very slow as it's easy to slip and slice your paw!

Then pull both the white wire and the black wire out in opposite directions. 

Now, with the wire cutters, clip off all the remaining shielding (the black stuff). Then strip back the black and white wire about a half of an inch back.

Now you will want to tin the wires. Tinning means to apply solder to something. This way when you tin the other end of what you want to solder togeather, you can use one hand to hold object A to object B, and with your other hand, touch with your soldering iron, and they will melt and connect together!

SETTING THE VOLTAGE

Now get your turntable, remove the slipmat, remove the headshell, remove the counter weight. 

Next you want to remove the platter. You can pull up on either side of the platter from the large open holes to lift it out. It takes a bit of rocking up and down to get it to lift out. If you still have trouble lifting it out, tap the center of the spindle with the handle of a hammer, handle of a screw driver, block of wood. After tapping a few times, try and lift out again.

When you have the platter removed you should see this.

Remove all the screws surrounding this black plastic cover (Officially known as the PCB Cover) but do not remove yet!

Now here is the voltage selector. If you are converting an EU turntable to US, you need to switch this voltage switch to 110.

USA = 110

EU = 220

If your turntable has already been used in the US, and you have a plug like this: 

Your voltage is already set properly at 110v

REMOVING/REPLACING THE EU POWER CABLE

You can now lift off the PCB Cover. This is what you will be greeted with!

Quick warning!

This gray box. Inside here is a transformer. This will still hold a charge for quite sometime. Thankfully we don't need to be messing with this! Touching the cover will not hurt you. But whenever you are working with these, some of them can produce a very painful shock, all the way to a deadly one, depending on the voltage.

Now the black cord, that's inside a clear plastic sheath. This is the power cable. You want to refer to this to know how it's run. You can see it comes up through a metal plate to the inside of the turntable.

It curves around the edge, behind the transformer. Up and over the yellow cables, and off the photo.

Here you can see where the power cable now runs to. The board there is marked AC, where the wires are going.

Each post is labeled N and L. 

Going by color, typically brown should be negative and blue positive. But not in this case. Ground (or Negative) is labeled "N"

With your wire cutters, snip off the zip ties, to free up the power cable from the rest of the cables

Now some of the wires can be a pain, depending on how they are done. You can just cut them off. Or you can heat them up with your soldiering iron in one hand, while gently pulling with plyers in the other hand, the wire (Dont pull hard! Hot solder will go flying!). Getting these free is up to you, how you do it!)

I used needle noze pliers to unwrap the wire while heating it up.

These need to be completely removed.

Okay now over to this plate. You need to pull this plug out. This is horribly difficult the first few times you have to deal with one of these. As I was not doing this for someone else, and I did not want it because of a mod I'm working on for it, I just broke it off. But the right side there, is supposed to pull out and free the wire.

After you get the tension plug removed, unscrew the two screws, and the plate will come out. Pull the wire out, from the plug side, not bare wire side. Make sure to remove the wire from the plastic sheath, you'll want to re-use this with your new cable. Throw the old cable away, or keep it for later projects!

Before anything, put your new plug through the plastic sheath, then feed it back inside, according to the above photos you want it to sit how the previous cable fit.

Now solder your tinned exposed wire ends onto the power boards posts!

Go ahead and put this annoying thing back (It's actually very useful and does a great job at what is for)

You can now put your PCB Cover back on, screw it down, put the platter back on, plug it in, and see if the platter spins!

Which it will if you do this simple guide correctly!

And that's it. Literally all it takes!