Weathers Industries

Weathers turntable rubber pucks & Tube Preamp

Hello,
I am new to this site and like many of you who have Weathers turntables have many questions and Problems.
When I first received my Weathers turntable the rubber pucks were only partially disintegrated and I was able to use it. It sounded great. Over time, however, the pucks disintegrated. The turntable is the two motor version with the solid state preamp.
First, I would like to know if there is anyone out there that has rubber pucks for the turntable. My turntable has two motors & unfortunately both pucks have disintegrated. I have tried to have the rubber pucks made but was not able to find a knowledgeable person to do it.
Second, I purchase a single tube Weathers preamp on eBay, but found when I received it that it had been extremely modified. It has a Brass Faceplate that is about 3" X 8 1/4" with 4 Brass knobs. The controls are for Volume, Bass, Treble, & Turnover. I can find no model number on the unit. The chassis is aluminum. It has a 12AX7 and a small Power Transformer.
Does anyone have a schematic? Now this one is a big one!!! If you have one of these Preamps but don't have the time or interest to make a schematic, could you loan me yours to do that. I will give you my dog for security.
Lastly, has anyone tried adding the Weathers arm and preamp to the early AR turntable. The ARM mounting hole is the correct distance from the Center pin of the Platter and should work. It is not as good as the Weathers, but it is can be purchased at a reasonable price on eBay (around where I live I no longer see any turntables worth modifying at garage sales or thrift stores) and it is considered one of the better turntables by a group of Audio Purist.
Thanks for any help you can give on the above!!

 

Weathers Turntables and Tonearms

Hello everyone and thanks Len for the interesting pieces of Weatheriana!
I would really like to know more about Paul Weathers, his products and his company.

The P-620 unit mentioned in one of the previous posts is the late version of the powersupply/oscillator combo to work with the Weathers FM Mono cartridge. It was equipped with a 12AX7 instead of the earlier unit that came with a 6AT6 tube.
The bigger preamplifier with the controlls to adjust the pickup to your listening room and various record cutting standards is called P-663. Unfortunately I do not have a schematic of this one.
I have a Weathers arm and FM cartridge attached to a Garrard 401 turntable and I'm really pleased with the results listening to mono records although the construction (heavy vs. light) is different from the route Paul Weathers took with his TTs.

Dirk

 

Re: Rubber pucks and AR turntable

Unfortunately, the pucks were made of pure gum rubber, so they deteriorated quickly. I have never found any suitable replacements. It should be no problem with an AR turntable, as they are very similar, yes, VERY similar!

Len

 

My first Weathers was the TT kit which allowed me, as a high-schooler, to enter into the world of manual turntables with an Audax arm (also kit) and a Weathers LM cartridge. Later, when stereo came along, I bought a pair of the "book" speakers which I mated to a University DVC woofer via a pair of home-made 100Hz filters. These served me well for a while until the VC began rubbing in one of the "books." A little dissection revealed the driver to be a very inexpensive 2x8 (or 2x9) auto speaker. I replaced it cheaply and got a few more years of use out of the pair.

Weathers' stuff always impressed as innovative and effective.

 

Most of the drivers in Weathers' speaker systems were surplus RCA units. Paul Weathers had close ties with RCA, plus the companies were very near each other. As I recall, those bookshelf drivers were treated with cotton glued to the cone. Other "modifications" were lead weights glued to the voice coils and a liquid solution treatment to cone edges. I still have the formula somewhere. Most of the speaker enclosures were sealed. He proved that you can "make a silk purse out of a sow's ear"!

 

Weathers Turntables -- Musings and Memories

I owned two of the earlier Weathers turntable versions -an ebony wood base with ebony arm and FM cartridge, and a walnut wood base with walnut arm and Stereoramic cartridge.

The Stereoramic was clearly a compromise, developed when Paul Weathers could not make the FM Stereo concept work. It was very bright and brassy sounding, and used a very light stylus shank butted to a Y-shaped rubber cushion, with 45-degree arms wedged against two parallel ceramic piezo plates above. Weathers advertised the compliance at something like 10x10-6 cm/dyne horizontally and somewhat less vertically, figures similar to the Weathers mono FM cartridge rating, but I never believed it as the stylus was fairly stiff to the touch.

The recommended tracking force was as I recall 1.5 to 2.5 grams and it was needed. The brightness of the cartridge added a truly amazing dimension on voice recordings (Bobby Darin's Mack the Knife sounded like he was SINGING RIGHT INTO YOUR EAR...) But it was hard listening to the inner grooves of complex orchestral music, or any worn recordings.

Weathers claimed the 0.1 volt (?) ceramic output worked fine plugged into a magnetic preamp, and it did only because the 47K impedance and mag roloff curve cut out all the high-frequency shatter and noise...

I later softened the brightness by sliding the stylus shank (mounted on the lower half of the cartridge) about 3/16 inch forward, so it met the Y-shaped rubber cushion closer to its fulcrum. This also increased the stylus compliance and reduced the needle talk.

About 1975 I replaced the Stereoramic cartridge with a decent magnetic cartridge and used the unit happily for 30 more years. The turntable's suspension was revolutionary--a lightweight plinth with lightweight platter, motor, and arm all mounted on SUSPENSION springs damped by soft foam rubber. The natural resonant (bounce) frequency was about 2 cycles per second, low enough to simply absorb bass notes, footsteps, and rumbling trucks outside. My unit was frequently used on top of a large speaker enclosure, and there was NEVER any acoustic feedback, of any kind, at any volume level, period. Try that on your Thorens.

The advantage of the basswood tone arm (being viscous-damped) was that even the clumsiest guest or child could "drop" it lightly onto a valuable record without scratching the record or mangling the stylus. This benefit was an echo of the original Weathers FM tone arm, made for broadcast, which achieved a zero-balance position about 3 inches above the record with an adjustable weight, then added a DOWNWARD stylus force of 1.5 gram with a small tension spring in the arm's vertical pivot--an over-center rocker on two metal pivot points. A disk jockey could just lift the arm slightly and let it go--it would rise up and stay there until he changed the record. Then he brought the arm back down onto the next record. A small SABLE brush on the cartridge absorbed half a gram of the stylus pressure, cleaning up dust before the stylus reached it, and not coincidentally damping out any low-frequency oscillations of the arm and cartridge combination. These features, added to the negligible record wear from a 1-gram tracking force and ultra high horizontal compliance made the Weathers FM tone arm the choice of most "good music" radio stations for a decade.

I distinctly remember reading that the drive wheel (not technically an idler) was made from Neoprene, which lasts forever compared to rubber. My gorgeous Walnut table, made in the early 60s, was still running perfectly in 2005 when I gave it to my son to use for old jazz LPs. He couldn't make room for it and threw it out. THREW IT OUT !!!! Guess I'm in the market, if anybody has one available...

 

Hi Gang...getting nostalgic. Was here back in 2008 and the last post here was 2010. Anyone left from those "good ole' days?" Guess we're all dying off. I've converted my vinyls (Audio Fidelity - Command - HiFi - Cook - London and Deutch Gramophone labels) to computer files, and still playing through my EV Georgians. My ole Weathers tonearms (2), gram gauge and preamp are laying on a shelf in plain view - lots of memories - tears an' stuff. Still the best sound around.

 

Weathers TT Owned By Frank McIntosh

Thought I'd share this. I imagine he had it shipped to AZ where he moved in the '70s. Presumably he'd have been using something else by then.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/WEATHERS-TU...=927256572548912694&pid=100015&prg=1006&rk=1&

 

I have a Weathers WR-3 three channel multiplex receiver with speakers.
This was bought new from the Weathers store in Mt Laurel NJ in the early 1970s.
Does anyone have same to talk about problems if they arise?

Also I seem to recall from back then that the counter person in the Weathers store said he used handicapped people for system assembly. Do you know if that is true?

 

Gene, I can't answer your WR-3 tech questions, but I am looking for one of those receivers myself.
Awhile back I acquired a 1960s-style Weathers stereo turntable oddly mounted on a nice custom enclosure. Bought it from a New Jersey gentleman whose said his father was friends with Paul Weathers. It has a cutout in front that would accommodate the electronics panel of a receiver, I believe. (Might actually have been a factory prototype, but nobody knows....)
I would love to try putting a WR-3 into it, since I suspect that's what it was designed for... So, if anybody has a working WR-3 (or other Weathers audio electronics) available, I'd be interested...

 

Whitman
Thanx for the reply and good luck on the search!
Gene

 

Paul Weathers was a superb businessman and design genius. No one could make something as good with so little so well.

 

Paul Weathers is my grandfather. I have 8 turntables of various models and states of disrepair, one tuner, various speakers, including the bookshelf speakers, a few records from the Weathers Industries label, and two of his RCA microphones. I only got the tuner and microphones from my aunt, the rest I bought on eBay and one from Surplus store, which was the only one that worked until I dropped something on it and broke the stylus. Anybody in Maryland that knows how to get these things working? I didn't get the audio engineering gene from Granddad, unfortunately. I'll answer any questions that I can, which might not be too much. I should get my Dad on here, Paul "Scott" Weathers, Jr. Len would probably remember him as he worked in the factory assembling the turntables as well.

 

This is a wood cartridge on a black Weathers arm. Can the stylus be fixed, or is there a suitable replacement cartridge?



Thanks, Steve

 

This is the Weathers FM cartridge in your picture. So far as I know the best you can do is to keep an eye on eBay for another cartridge to use as a replacement. I've never seen a replacement stylus for this cartridge either.
Regards, Cliff.
[new to this forum, first post, with 6 Weathers tables in my collection, only one working due to the lack of drive wheels.]

 

I was a big fan of Weathers. I had the wonderful FM cartridge and one of his turntables.
However, I find no mention in the forum (or anywhere else) of the vinyl recordings that were produced by Weathers Industries, nor can I locate any reference to them on the 'Net.' One album that I owned featured a big band (whose name I can't remember), and one of the cuts was the song "Adios" - done so well musically and acoustically that I often used it to show off my hi-fi setup to fellow audiophiles.
If anyone out there can fill in the blanks (band name? album name?) I'd appreciate it. Thanks.

 

Ha! I remembered the name of the leader/arranger of one of the recordings by Weathers - it was Dean Kincaid. He was associated with Tommy Dorsey and played in the Tonight Show band.

 

I'm going to guess that this isn't from the 60s and it probably doesn't want a receiver. There was a Weathers turntable that came in a formica plinth (either red or blond, to look like mahogany or birch, I think). It took one of the preamps that was mentioned earlier in this thread. It came with a black painted wooden arm that held an FM cartridge. The deal is that if you use an FM cartridge, you have to have the other end to get it to work. The preamp had both the oscillator circuits for the FM cartridge and rollover and slope controls for playing 78s by different labels (records didn't standardize until RIAA with (most) LPs). In fact, I think that this was the only Weathers that had 78.

I think that the model is called The Diplomat (or maybe The Ambassador) but I wasn't able to find a good picture for you online.

Richard

 

Astatic made replace styli as well. You can find them new old stock for sure. I just found two on Amazon without much trouble. At least one of them was really overpriced by may be for the 3 mil stylus which is kind of unusual (for 78s)

 

I have only two records that Weathers did (I think). One is "Musical Gadgetry" and that was music boxes. The other is Tony Desmond, called "Musical Memoirs". Kincaid's would be at least a third. I wonder how many he did.

 

The album was "arranged for you" by Deane Kincaide, # W-5610

 

Weathers did make a turntable (in the 1960s) that had a walnut base with a cut out for a TEC transistor amp (grey) (Lafayette Radio also sold the same amp ((tan) with their name on it) The turntable was sold with the Moderne Trio speaker system. The amplifier for the bass module and the cartridge preamp were also installed in the turntable base. A walnut cabinet with a opening top could also be purchased, it had record storage space below the turntable.

 

If I remember correctly the Weathers' Harmony Trio and Moderne Trio speaker system used "Rola" drivers prior to that some RCA drivers were used in the large floor standing and book shelf speakers.