I got a phone call from my friend Steve who has a vintage furniture business "you might be interested in this..."

Intrigued, I headed over to his showroom in Digbeth and he showed me this bizarre looking box. To be honest I thought it was a home made fridge or something equally bizarre.

Now Steve can be a bit of a joker but I knew he wouldn't be wasting my time. When I opened the box I was excited to see one of the most iconic British turntables ever made - a very sorry looking Garrard 301 with a pair of equally iconic and equally sorry SME 3009 tonearms. Despite the obvious signs of neglect, broken switches etc the chassis was actually in pretty good cosmetic condition so we agreed a price and I took it back to RPM...

First thing was to see if the old thing actually ran so I hooked it up to the variac and gradually brought it up to 230v. The first thing I noticed was the motor still ran even when the switch is in the "off" position - this is a common issue and easily rectified by replacing the spark suppressor capacitor. I made a list of other replacement parts (the speed selector switch was snapped off for a start) and ordered them from a specialist supplier but after a thorough clean it was actually spinning quite nicely.

After removing, cleaning and replacing the motor mounts, cleaning and lubricating the motor and bearing, thoroughly cleaning the speed change mechanism, idler wheel bearing etc., replacing the mains cable and giving the whole thing a thorough deep clean and polish I was pleased to find that, despite being nearly 70 years old and suffering years of neglect, the speed stability and motor noise was better than I'd hoped...

I managed to find a tatty but solid old plinth from eBay and asked my friend Chris (who builds custom speaker cabinets and turntable plinths) if he could use this as a start point for the plinth I had in mind. A couple of weeks later, with an extra top layer so the 301 could be flush mounted, the corners rounded off and finished in a stunning striped rosewood veneer, the refurbished plinth was ready.

The SME tonearm was stripped down, polished and rewired, and a NOS vintage Shure cartridge was fitted.

The whole thing was reassembled and the tonearm was properly set up and aligned. 70 years after it was manufactured and undoubtedly sounding better than it ever did.

An absolutely stunning example of iconic British HiFi, fully restored and giving its new owner endless hours of listening pleasure...