I bought a mid '80s Star Sapphire with vacuum on Ebay around 2000, and almost immediately made a new plinth for it and replaced all of the suspension. The original golden oak plinth was so peak '80s that it had to go. The plinth I built was bleached wenge with finger jointed corners and clean chamfers instead of quarter round corners. I don't have any really good pictures, but here's my older son thinking "WTF dad?' around 2012.
And then in 2017 with the original vacuum pump seals dried out and failing and after making some custom parts for a new TT manufacturer I got a wild hair to do a major re-work. The new table was going to lose the suspended sub-chassis and be a very high mass rigid deck.
This happened:
I found a German company making a similar diaphragm type vacuum pump that was about twice the power of the original and decided on a heavy plinth with the platter, a separate module that would have the motor, power supply and controls with a very heavy vacuum module that could be placed way from everything else for the best isolation. The platter section is stacked Baltic Birch ply laminated to a 1" thick 6061 aluminum plate that the bearing would mount to.
The motor and power supply were going into a smaller volume built up on a 3/4" 6061 aluminum plate that would all be enclosed in a birch ply box:
There was a lot of stuff to cram into the motor module:
It started coming together like this:
The back of the motor module has an IEC receptacle for power in, A specialty connector for the vacuum power and control cable, and the fuses:
So the main platter and motor come together like this:
I had an abundance of this crazy hard south American hardwood from a commercial project I was building and I used that to make a 12" diameter cylinder for the vacuum module, and I found 10" diameter aluminum rem for the base.
Mass is one of the best things for damping noise and vibration, so Every bit of this rebuild added mass liberally.
The whole thing got veneered in a some really nice zebrawood...
A nice lacquer finish, and I set it up with two arms, my trusty SME mkVI arm and a new 12" Triangle Art Osiris magnetic bearing arm.
The finished deck is a huge upgrade from the original which was already a very good deck. After doing this I've been pondering building one from scratch and collecting parts to do so.
This is probably far more than you have in mind for your deck... A basic rebuild on that will involve replacing the suspension springs and rebalancing the the sub-platter. There's not a whole to those. They're pretty straight forward. You'll want the composite arm board. I might still have one if you're interested...
Thge sky's the limit though. The only limitations are time and budget. the rest is all imagination.
eso