pulling a reel table...

[Gkar]

Hi, all, got a real doozy here.  posted on a couple of other sites, thought I try here as well...

howdy, got this one a couple of months ago, was used in a local (DC-101) studio, and looks it! Heads in nice shape though, not much wear at all, I have been working through this machine fixing one problem after another, the latest to rear it's ugly head is the adjustment of the reel tables, my feed table is too low, and the reels rub against the metal cover (what I think is called the "dress cover"?...), using the instructions, I got to the adjustment feature, however, the reel turntable support hub is frozen! In fact, there is a dent in the dress cover, it looks like someone at one time tried to raise the hub and dented the cover. Following the instructions in the manual, I note, and have seen on eBay, that the motors are mounted on brackets that attached to ? on the machine, in mine, the reel motors attach to a large cast metal top member onto which the various parts are mounted, motors will not come out unless the reel tables are removed. Any suggestions on getting the frozen tables off? thanks!

[ironbut]

Hey Randy,
What kind of machine is it?
I was right with you until the part about the "reel support hub".  Is that the reel table?

One thing that you should try at this point, is to try and lower the reel table height. I realize that you want to raise it but it may be that a some point or other, the machine was dropped on it's face and the chassis and/or the motor housing that attaches it to the chassis was pushed in. If that's the case, it could be that the table height adjustment is already at it's extreme. If the table can be adjusted lower, it may mean that without straightening whatever might be bent, that's as far as she goes.

One thing that's important to know about many of these reel motors is that the magnets inside of them can be very powerful. If you need to disassemble one of these motors, they can seem like they're stuck together but it can just be the magnet's attraction to the cores of the armatures. Just be careful since magnetic force declines rapidly with distance so once you get the two out of intimate proximity, it lets go all of the sudden! (one time I pulled a motor apart, I bloodied my lip when it came apart)

If you aren't able to adjust the height up or down, it's also possible that it was damaged and the only way to get it working at all was to adjust everything to the extreme and "lok-tight" everything in that spot.
You might want to put a straight edge across the machine to see if it's "true". Remember, most machines only have a couple of millimeters of adjustment on the tables so it could be difficult to see a that slight of a bend of the top.

[Gkar]

Thanks, Steve, I posted this over at homerecording.com to Cory, who is doing a major restoration of an Ampex MM-1100, that blog/link was posted here by DocB, I think.  At any rate, Cory gave me a suggestion on how to remove the reel tables, and I got the first one off, hooray!  And I can see on the reel motor shaft that there is a pair of slots that limit the upper and lower heights that you can adjust for the tables.  I should have know something was up when I saw obvious marks on the dress plate from the scrubbing of the 10 1/2" reels in the past, it would appear that the idiots using the machine in the radio station had somehow knock the reel tables down and left them too low, causing the scrub marks.  So know it is dressing up the areas on the motor shaft and inside the collar so that I can put the reel table back on and have full adjustment available, thanks, Randy