THE PLAN

Being an esoteric kind of guy, rather than doing the sensible thing and building a box with a stepper motor in the middle, I thought it would be fun to instead buy an old LP record player from ebay and turn that into a turn table; my idea of fun may not be the same as most people's. After locating a nice compact unit and buying it for the princely sum of ten quid, I started ripping it apart to remove all the parts I wouldn't need- which was most of them- and to assess how I would go about mounting the bits I would need, not an easy task as there is not much room inside an LP player it turns out. With all the guts removed I also took a moment to sand a part smooth ( something to do with detecting if an LP is on the platter ) and reinstalled it- there are enough holes in the platter already.

THE MOTOR

I spent a little while researching motor options and settled on compact little NEMA 40 that has more than enough power for my needs, made a paper template for the mounting holes and transferred those to the LP player and drilled them out. The motor was mounted in place with some rubber O-rings to reduce vibrations and a quick functionality test carried out to make sure it worked correctly ( not shown is the day of researching the wiring for stepper motor controllers and trying to translate Chinese text- that was a pain experience but a few old Reddit posts saved me further headaches ). With that done I needed to trim down the motor shaft and grind a crown onto the gear I was using- I tried it without but the drive belt kept riding up the gear and over the top, with a nice curve added if stayed perfectly centered. I actually had to mount the gear to a piece of metal rod, then put that into the chuck on my pillar drill before using a small file to gradually add the crown- ghetto lathe ftw.

FINALISING THE TABLE

With the mechanism working I set about finalising the inards of the turn table, starting with the wiring. I opted to use Wago connectors to splice longer wires onto the stepper motor in order to have an external control box- no where near enough room inside the player so external gubbins was the best solution. Some cable sleaving and a grommet tidied things up and I moved onto the feet; the originals were too short with the stepper motor hanging out the bottom of the casing, so longer ones sourced from ebay were used in their place after a little modification to install washers given that I couldn't use larger diameter screws. With all that done I could assemble the player for the last time, it was actually starting to look like something rather than a pile of bits.

THE CONTROL BOX

Since there was no room inside the player for the electronics I started looking for a suitable project box to house the 4S Lipo battery, Driver and Controller- turns out project boxes that size don't really exist or cost a small fortune if they do. Instead, I picked up a still not-cheap organiser box ( nine quid! ) that fit the bill and started drilling holes in it for the various components to poke through. One for the sleaved cable ( with grommet ), three for the controller... controls, and a couple for the power switch ( saved from an old carpet cleaner no less ) and a voltmeter display in order to monitor the Lipo voltage- the display only turns on when the switch is flipped to connect power, ideal. I've included a wiring diagram just in case it's useful to anyone else- if you try a google search most results only show wiring with an arduino or similar controller, not the cheap basic controller that can be found for cheap all over the web.

FINAL TOUCHES

Everything wired up and working, so onto the final touches. I couldn't cut the spindle shorter for obvious reasons, so I needed to add a thick sheet of foam to the turn table platter in order to create a smooth, flat surface for items to sit on without being tilted to one side. 10mm EPA foam, a giant compass, some scissors and a bit of sandpaper did the job and a new foam slip matt was created, looks nice and neat on the platter and spins evenly too- top speed is roughly 7.5 RPM, doesn't sound fast but that's one revolution every eight seconds, plenty fast enough for photography or video making- minimum speed is unknown, very very slow being the answer there, ideal for time lapse work.

I'm looking forward to putting this into use, wish I had a decent turn table years ago but never mind..