Opera Consonance Wax Engine Anti-Skate Modification (DIY Fix)

Fixing the Anti-Skate Mechanism on the Opera Consonance Wax Engine 

If you own an Opera Consonance Wax Engine turntable, you’ve probably noticed that the anti-skate mechanism isn’t exactly its strongest point.

It’s a beautifully designed piece of equipment — almost like a collaboration between an engineer and an industrial designer who refused to compromise — but the original anti-skate solution feels a bit… improvised. The stock design uses a thin wire to hold the counterweight. In theory, it works. In practice, it bends, flexes, and occasionally behaves in ways that are anything but “high-end.”

So instead of living with it, I decided to redesign the whole mechanism using a dual-pulley, ball-bearing system — something mechanically simple, but far more stable and predictable.

This post documents that process, along with the 3D-printable parts if you want to build one yourself.

I ended up with an Opera Consonance Wax Engine turntable. I really like the design, and it’s generally considered a solid piece of gear — I couldn’t find any bad reviews. However, it does have two issues. One is minor and I’ve just fixed it. The other one is more involved, and I’m still working on it.

The two problems are:

• The anti-skate weight support is just a thin wire, and it flexes

• The turntable does not hold speed consistently

To be clear, it doesn’t audibly wobble during playback — a single record plays fine. But if I measure the speed at different times, I get values between 32.8 and 33.6 RPM. For a mere mortal like me, that’s not something I can hear directly. Still, the behavior is I set it perfectly in the evening, and by morning it drifts again — a bit like the Hungarian legend of Kőműves Kelemen, where whatever is built during the day mysteriously falls apart overnight. although it does hold that new value for a while.

I noticed this while doing A/B tests against digital playback — that’s when small pitch differences started to show up. One upside is that I ended up buying a digital speed meter, which is far more useful than a strobe since it gives decimal precision. Sure, hundredths would be nicer, but I’ll take it.

But back to the successful part of the project.

 

The original anti-skate weight support is just a thin piece of wire. That would be fine if it were stiff enough — but it isn’t. When the tonearm starts moving, the support bends slightly, the string pulls on it, then at some point friction is no longer sufficient, it snaps back, and the whole process repeats. Not exactly “high-end” behavior. So the idea came naturally: let’s replace it.

The initial concept was to build something like a well sweep (a lever arm), with a small ball bearing at the end, and run the line over it. After the first sketches, I realized the problem: the tonearm moves along an arc, so the line would not approach the pulley at a consistent angle.

To fix this, I introduced a second pulley, perpendicular to the first one (vertical axis in this case). The line always approaches this pulley at the correct angle, only wrapping around it more or less depending on arm position. This, in turn, feeds the line perfectly onto the horizontal pulley. Of course, you can’t just mount bearings on a piece of wire, so I needed a proper support structure. A small tube with internal shoulders turned out to be the best solution — it holds the bearing axle nicely in place.

The idea made sense after a few sketches, but I needed a tool to actually design the part. And of course, the obvious solution was 3D printing — otherwise this would have been ridiculously expensive. After a bit of research, FreeCAD seemed like the right tool. I wasn’t about to buy AutoCAD for a single project.

 

FreeCAD was horrible at first — I couldn’t do anything with it. But after finding some tutorials and documentation, things slowly started to come together. I wouldn’t say the result is perfect — for example, it’s not properly parameterized — but it works.

I made one more modification. Originally, the weight was suspended on a thin fishing line. The problem with that is permanent deformation. I wanted to avoid this, so I came up with two alternatives.

One was to use human hair — sourced from my daughter. The other, suggested by ChatGPT, was an ultra-thin braided fishing line.

Both have pros and cons. Hair strands are not uniform, extremely annoying to tie, they age, and they do stretch over time. On the other hand, they are incredibly thin — probably unbeatable mechanically. The fishing line, however, is manufactured consistently, easier to work with, doesn’t stretch, and comes in various colors. (Okay, that last one is not exactly a major advantage.)

At the moment I’m using hair. We’ll see how it behaves over time — whether I’ll need to replace it or switch to fishing line. If you go with fishing line, feel free to pick the thinnest one you can find. It will be strong enough, and mechanically, thinner is better.

 

I finished the system today. The pulley caps haven’t arrived yet, and my pulleys are hand-made aluminum pieces, so they don’t look particularly professional. But the system works beautifully.

The axle holes are intentionally slightly undersized compared to nominal dimensions, so any printing inaccuracies won’t cause issues. During assembly, they need to be drilled out to 2 mm. That size is already stiff enough to hold the bearings securely without flexing.

 Git Repo with printables 

Printables project page