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Building a Tuthill/Reed 5A Tangential Tracking Pivot Tonearm
I have been studying Reed 5A and trying to design my own building plan. After many different versions of the design, I finally came up with the version I think has the smallest tracking errors. I would like to prompt criticisms and suggestions before I start to build. There are two things I paid a great deal of attention to. First, I concentrated in the playable area only. Please see the gray area in the diagram. Secondly, I tried to minimize the tracking errors.
The purpose to build a clone of Reed 5A is to approve that a tangential tracking pivot arm based on Birch geometry won’t skate. I intend to build a fully working arm without actual wiring. If one day, all of a sudden, I have eager to listen to this arm, I can simply wire the arm up and have a listen.
In theory, Birch geometry is not perfect. Therefore, there are some small tracking errors. As long as the tracking error exists, it means that side force exists. But in reality, such side forces are so small that they are not strong enough to cause arm skating. So, an arm based on Birch geometry won’t skate in reality. This is all I care about. For my arm, the largest tracking error is 0.1 degrees. In the diagram, the largest tracking error exists the most inner groove. If in actual use, I can align the arm so that the largest tracking error will be on the most outer groove since it is easy to play the most outer groove. Please see the diagram for tracking error analysis.
Comparing Reed 5A with my design, I think my arm has less tracking errors than Reed 5A. Of course, I can be wrong since I don’t have the data for Reed 5A. All the analyses are based on the screen catch from the video of Reed 5A.
I am going to build the arm and all the results will be posted under this thread.
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