[omegaman]

Progress

Disassembling and lubing the mechanical switch itself restored the true function of the reject/run/off switch. I just gently, gently, gently pulled up and rocked the top part of the switch until it came off, the the same with the lower part.

A few drips of light machine oil into the shaft and by the next day it was completely free

Now toggling reject returns the switch to run and the whole switch mechanism is very smooth with feather touch control

Only a few more issues left:

Stacking an LP and toggling reject, drops the record fine, but the arm returns to rest and shuts off instead of placing the tone arm on the record.
but
If I stop the hold down arm from dropping (like there's another record stacked) after the record drops, it all works great and places the tone arm on the record to play

So obviously something else needs lube/adjustment

RE the cartridge:
I am going to add the 10k resistors and see if it improves the hi freqs else a new cartridge is in order