On another subject, setting anti-skating. I talked to J.R. of Wally's Tools at AXPONA about alot of subjects. He can talk alot and impress you with how smart he is while holding back useful technical information that actually might be useful. He does a have a rube-goldberg like device for setting anti-skate that Michael Fremer recommends. I did figure the engineering behind it and its pretty clever and easy for us to replicate for less than the $300 he charges for it.
Picture tying a string to your headshell pickup lever and tie to a point vertically above. Assume your tonearm is resting on its lift. Set the string length so when the tonearm lift is lowered the tonearm is suspended by the string (like a crane). Now lower the lift. The anti-skate force set for your arm will cause the arm to move away from the spindle and it will stop with some angle of the string off vertical. The tangent of that angle is the ratio of anti-skate force at the stylus to the VTF.
Assuming that the friction coefficient of the stylus in the vinyl groove is about 0.25, and the cartridge offset angle is around 22deg, tan(angle) should be around 0.2*sin(22) = 0.093. Or simply, the horizontal distance moved should be around 10% of the vertical distance. I think this method is superior all the others.
I drew all these vectors out but was too lazy to make a postable version of it. If this description did not convey I will be happy to draw something up.
