I took the plunge and did a rewind myself. It took two days and cost about $35 in materials. Fingers crossed!

^ Something I've never attempted and would probably only do out of desperation.

Do you have a coil winder, or did you knock something up for the job?

The winding is the easy part, assuming you have a rev counter to take care of counting the number of turns you've wound on. The hard bit is removing all the old varnished wire and counting the turns, especially on the higher voltage windings.

When I was doing my time I was occasionally given the job of rewinding coils, transformers and motors. It was economically viable to do those things back when a new 40 horsepower motor would cost upwards of $4,000.00 in today's money.

For transformers and solenoid coils the windings go straight into a fibre bobbin and I used to rig that up in our trusty Hercus lathe and let the machine do the work. We had an attachment that triggered a device that counted the revolutions so I'd know how many turns ended up on the new winding. At times it was possible to reverse this procedure to count the turns on the old winding but when doing this you'd eventually end up at the spot where the explosion took place and this meant resorting to guesswork, counting the turns of wire that no longer existed. On other occasions it was a matter of hacksawing a winding in half because of the amount of varnish used to stop it vibrating and counting each strand of wire in the cross-section.

Despite being a fiddly job, watching a rewound motor or transformer start a new life is quite satisfying. I have a couple of AWA power transformers which ended their days in the ultimate display of self-sacrifice. I am going to rewind them at Christmas time, giving myself time to set up a suitable rig for this sort of work.

I made a hand winder out of Meccano, and attached a slow gear to count every five turns; counting up to 400 is easier than 2000! The original coil has about 2500 turns each side of the centre tap, but I couldn't find wire fine enough to fit this many turns. I used Nitto amalgamation tape for insulation. The rewound coil works, but I've yet to check how well it works in terms of frequency response and output level.

Does anyone know what the gain of an EL42 would be under proper condtions of load?

These may be helpful:-

http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/tubes-valves/128662-design-using-el42-output-pentodes.html.

http://www.mif.pg.gda.pl/homepages/frank/sheets/030/e/EL42.pdf.

I've put the player back together, and it sounds as it should; I tested it with an old Beatles record I used to listen to on our original Pye BBH. I just have to sort out the cartridge and the playing weight. I'm using a Ronette 105 stereo crystal series wired for mono, 8 grams pressure, but it tends to skip on the inner tracks of LPs. 12 grams is recommended for the BSR turntable, but 9 grams is the maximum recommended for the Ronette.

Fixed the skipping using an alignment template. The Ronette has to be set absolutely parallel to the inner grooves of a record or it get thrown by sudden wiggles.