Garrard Model 770M Turntable Restoration

One of my favorite pastimes is scrounging around on online secondhand marketplaces and thrift stores for interesting gadgets worth bringing back into peak working condition. There's a certain satisfaction about finding some battered old throwaway and turning back the years of neglect to find something genuinely useful, or at least super cool. In some cases, it's a chance to visit a bygone era and bring a piece of it back to life. This Garrard Model 770M turntable was certainly all of the above.

I found the Garrard at a local Goodwill for a whopping twelve bucks and despite the layer of dust and grime, scratches and scuffs defacing it's surface, the deck still had this otherworldly appearance to it sitting amongst the piles of random audio equipment. The black chassis and wood veneer just screamed 1970s, like an Atari 2600. Though at the time, that wasn't the main appeal to me. 

Mistakes were made. Lessons were learned.

I was already on the hunt for a deck to replace the little portable Crosley I got as a Christmas present. While I give it credit for introducing me to vinyl (and also making me better appreciate just how damn lucky we are being able to carry hundreds to thousands of songs in our pocket and play them without having to screw around with a finicky and functionally limited contraption), it's hideously tinny sound quality and even worse; it's lack of a grounding line meant a total inability to run with a pre-amp. Of course, when I tried, it turned all my albums into a YouTube ear-rape compilation.

The Garrard at bare minimum featured a grounding cable which was all I needed to hopefully play my records on my Klipsch Three II with the pre-amp on, and not have them sound like complete shit. Everything else the deck had to offer was just icing on the cake. It was a fully automatic changer, meaning it could take a stack of records, drop them onto the platter, and play them all in sequence whist actuating the tonearm back and forth between each drop. It also had four speed settings, three of which I can almost guarantee are hardly ever going to be touched, but just in case. 

However, this turntable was determined to fight me tooth and nail for every bit of it's functionality. The speed selector lever was stuck on the 33 RPM 12-inch setting and the back left frame of the dust cover was broken loose. It was only when I cracked this thing open that I realized the true extent of what was wrong with this turntable and that fixing it required me to grapple against some truly nightmarish remarkable feats of mechanical engineering.

Once you get the turntable out of it's plastic enclosure by flipping the locking catches underneath into the vertical position and removing the cable clamp, you'll find something that vaguely resembles the Antikythera mechanism. Other than the electric motor, power switch, and tonearm, there isn't a single electronic component in this entire mechanism. All the speed control, tonearm lifting and rotation, and record dropping is done all mechanically.

With that in mind, the culprit was pretty easy to figure out: old grease. Being over four-decades old, it's hardly a surprise that the grease in this turntable turned into a tacky sludge that damn near seized up anything it was applied to - and this stuff was everywhere. That meant, regardless of the problem I was hoping to focus on, a full teardown and cleanup was completely necessary.

What was nice is that the bulk of the mechanism lifts out in one piece. Remove the tonearm, pop off the locking washers for the lever linkage arms, and undo the nuts to free this neat little package of mechanical madness. Armed with a flathead screwdriver, a bottle of Goo Gone, and a tube of white lithium grease, I started stripping the mechanism and giving it a deep cleanse and re-lube. I was not armed with the service manual however, so I had to photograph damn near every portion of the mechanism to ensure I didn't forget where any one of the gazillion tiny pieces went. 

That led me to the source of the speed selector problems: that U-shaped cam slot. The actuation of the slot moves tells the turntable where to drop the tonearm depending on the speed setting and record size.  The underside of this plate was slathered in old grease and it had prevented the pin from moving through the slot. It was so stuck, that it's honestly a miracle the plastic part of the linkage didn't get broken from people trying to force it. 

Unfortunately, the plate was riveted into place so I couldn't completely take it apart to clean it, but getting a piece of paper underneath it, spraying it with IPA and running it through a few times seemed to remove most of the junk. I also attempted to give the cam slot a light sanding to try and remove the burr along the edge. After adding a generous amount of lithium grease, the cam slot and pin moved like butter. 

Yet even after regreasing the entire mechanism, it was still stuck on 33 RPM 12-inch. What led me to the culprit was this zig-zag shaped piece of plastic that doubles are both a detent for the lever, and the lifter for the idler wheel which changes the gear ratio between it and the motor shaft. That metal bar is supposed to come to rest in the first indentation on the piece. Instead, it managed to get stuck right before it where the no amount of force on the lever could pop it out. 

Between the plastic lever, the cam slot, and this piece is a large metal linkage that rides between the main guts of the turntable and the underside of the platter. Turns out that part of it was bent just enough to throw everything out of alignment. After hammering it straight again, the zig-zag shaped piece of plastic came to rest in the correct position, and the speed selector mechanism was working once again.

With all the mechanical issues seemingly sorted out, it was time for reassembly, initial calibration of the tonearm, and a first test run. Unfortunately, two more issues reared their ugly heads shortly I started dialing in the turntable for the first time. The first was that the idler wheel was slipping against the platter as it worked it's way up to speed but thankfully this issue resolved itself after a couple of runs. I believe the hard edge on the idler wheel gradually wore away as it rubbed against the platter, restoring it's grip. 

The second, more glaring issue was that the entire left channel was gone. I originally assumed it was the cartridge since it was very old Shure M93 that I had zero knowledge of it's longevity, so I promptly replaced it with an Audio-Technica AT-VM95C, but even the new cartridge didn't fix the dead channel. Turns out, the problem was the design of the Model 770's headshell. It uses a kind of unorthodox design that slides out of the front of the tonearm, connected by four super flimsy contacts. After bending these contacts outward a bit, the left channel was restored.

The last order of the day was cosmetics. All things considered, the turntable was in pretty good cosmetic shape for it's age. The dust cover was easily the worst part however, with a massive gouge through the top one of the clips that held the back portion of it in place had snapped off. I reconstructed the clip with epoxy putty and then polished the dust cover to the best of my ability with a headlight restoration kit. The deep gouges are still there, but they're far less noticeable now. After the final wipe down and the addition of felt feet, the old Garrard was ready to spin again.

I ended up using this turntable for about a year now as my main deck and it's been totally serviceable.

I opted to keep using the AT-VM95C cartridge over the old Shure, but either cartridge produced sound out of this thing way better than I would've ever expected. The lows were punchy and the highs were reasonably clear on either cart. The automatic mechanism was a nice touch of added convenience as well. It's damn near set it and forget it.

My only complaints were the slight 'whooshing' noise in the background I presume is from the motor drive and the wonky record changing spindle. Otherwise, I thought the old deck was a treat to use. No, it's not going to make an audiophile giddy with excitement, but if you came from a piece of crap suitcase player and from that experience figured vinyl sounds inherently terrible as a medium, I guarantee this dirt-cheap thrift store Garrard would change your mind. As far as proper entry points into the world of vinyl records go, this ended up being a pretty good one.