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. Â 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.