Month: October 2015

In starting into the collecting phonographs I hadn’t really considered the fact that I might end up with a large collection of things to play on them. Quite often when I find someone looking to offload a system they have a large set of records that need to go with it. This has opened me up to a whole new set of problems. How do I best keep track of all of these records and store them in a way that makes sense and yet doesn’t become overly burdensome. I have started to use discogs.com to inventory what I have. For someone that has just started to collect I find the database is missing around 40% of what I have and I am constantly adding to it. I’m thrilled about the fact it is open and dumps of the data are available, should be fun looking through it.

Yesterday I did a rebuild on the reproducer for my VV-300. I’d listened to some records using a fiber needle and some osage orange thorns previously but didn’t want to use anything too strong until I had rebuilt it. Using a thorn I could immediately tell the difference between when it had the old gaskets and the new. I had just found a copy of Rhapsody in Blue that day and it gave me watery eyes listening to it with the new reproducer. I also received a set of steel needles, both soft and loud tone. Having never used the loud tone needles I put one in and threw on one of my older Caruso records. With the loud tone needle doing it’s thing I actually needed to back away from the victrola due to the sound volume hurting my ears. The next project up is trying to rebuild my Cecilian reproducer which might be a bit more of a challenge because I don’t see any gaskets like the one this uses to attach to the tone arm or rebuilding the spring motor for that machine. Both will be fun projects.

I want to give a shout out to Walt Sommers as I purchased the parts from his ebay store and he had them out the door and in my hands in short order.

It was a wild and crazy weekend that ended my tripling my machine collection, adding a nice set of 78s and finally hearing some spring powered sound.

There are now two new piece of furniture in the basement. The first  is a Model-50 Adler-Royal. I got this from man who’s wife had passed away a few years ago and she had gotten it from her mother, both with hopes to restore it. Included with it were 3 single sided Caruso records, which were a nice add. It has an empty cabinet on the left side and which apparently is where when you bought this model you could have a radio installed. There is a switch in the phonograph area mark R <— > P which I assume means you can switch between the two. I haven’t taken it apart enough to look at all the internals yet. Looking forward to cleaning this up and seeing what it looks once that is done.

The second machine I picked up was a VV300. I found this in the West Bottoms and it is in pretty bad condition externally. I don’t think there is a single piece of veneer that actually still has the top layer of veneer on it or any layer of finish left on a piece of wood. Three of the four knobs that should be there are missing and there are no keys for the locks. With all that exterior damage it still winds up and will play records. In order to test this out I picked up a few records at a flea market. I was pretty itchy to test these new machines but didn’t want to use the steel needles that came with them very much since I imagine using them much will certainly do some damage to the records.  In some of the piece I’ve read they talked about cactus needles, which lead to me reading about mesquite and osage orange needles. We happen to have a large number of osage orange trees in the woods so I gave them a go.

 

My wife and I made a trip down to the West Bottoms today. There was a Craigslist ad for a Victrola that if we were to say it was “well worn” would make it sound like it is in better shape than it actually is. I expected to go down there and find a sleepy little antique shop. My first notion things were not going to turn out as I was expecting was signs for $10 VIP parking close to where I wanted to be and $5 parking a few blocks away. I had not idea the West Bottoms has exploded as a little corner of the city where everyone goes out to find old interior decoration pieces. There were blocked streets, people and food trucks all over the place. We went into a couple other places in addition to my target store and I saw a couple other Victrolas, but they were both a bit much for my taste. The mission was accomplished, though picked needed to be scheduled for another day. Once I get it home I’ll post a couple pics of my second machine.

I’ve started to add images of different cabinets and what they are out there. I can find a decent number of pages that cover the external horn machines, I don’t find very many that cover the internal horn models. Personally I like the wood cabinet and the magic that goes with revealing this wonderful thing that exists inside the cabinet. It’s like digging into a chocolate and finding this great surprise at the center.

In addition to photos of machines I hope to start populating another gallery with old advertisements. I’ve been running into those as I browse around and it’s fun to see what angle they were taking selling certain models and how much they cost nearly 100 years ago.