[criageek]

Today's post is about the phono impedance matching transformer.  I doubt that these things go bad very often, so this may not be useful to anyone, but just in case, here is the story behind mine.  Many years ago the RCA connector on mine was damaged and the center pin pulled out.

     

Obviously this is unusable, so I decided I had nothing to lose by trying to repair it.  So I took my Dremel with a cutting wheel attachment and was going to just try to grind off the heads of the rivets and then pull the top off.  But after cutting a nice groove in the first rivet I decided to try to turn it with a screwdriver, and what do you know...it twisted out!  Here I've taken two completely out and one is part way out.

   

After removing all the rivets I had to heat up each terminal on the connector and suck the solder out of them.  The center pin of the RCA connector was already gone but if it had been there it would be removed the same way.  Once all the pins were clean I was able to pull the top off.

   

Here's what the rivets look like.

   

I'm going to have to splice a little wire onto the wire for the center pin of the RCA connector and glue the pin back into the connector.  But I think I'm going to be able to salvage it  

Rich