The rise and fall of the caster on floor model phonographs

[EarlH]

Some pianos got the same style castor as well! I can't remember what kind of a piano I took this one off when I junked it out, but they are really nice castors. I never have been all that wild about the Feltoid castors, but they were sure popular with Edison and Victor.

[marcapra]

Yes Earl, that caster looks similar in design to mine except the stem is too short and maybe too thick. It may be bigger as well. I've found from looking around that antique casters are hard to come by! Even the so called antique stores that specialize in antique hardware can't help me. If you are throwing a cabinet away, save the casters!

[Valecnik]

Many machines need casters to be historically correct and aesthetically more attractive but from a practical point of view they are almost useless in most cases.

They are always stuck in the wrong direction. They scratch the hell out of hardwood floors and you risk breaking a leg on your machine rolling them around. I have an A-250 Diamond Disc in the living room. I move it a bit one direction or another from time to time but remove the records first. Removing and putting back 100 diamond discs just to move your machine is a pain. For a move across the room or to a different room I still remove the records but use a dolly.

[EarlH]

Yes Earl, that caster looks similar in design to mine except the stem is too short and maybe too thick. It may be bigger as well. I've found from looking around that antique casters are hard to come by! Even the so called antique stores that specialize in antique hardware can't help me. If you are throwing a cabinet away, save the casters!

I refinished a 1-A two years ago and these castors are definitely bigger than the one's that were under the machine I worked on, but design wise, are almost identical. They are really well made and work fine if they are cleaned up and oiled. I used to have 5 or 6 five gallon pails of piano castors and it was nearly impossible to match them with a broken one on a piano, so I usually just replaced both of the rear one's and often times had to shim up one pair or the other to get the correct height. It's almost beyond belief that something as simple as a castor or hinge could have been made in so many varieties years ago, and now your lucky to have 2 or 3 choices when it comes to hardware. And often times there's almost no way to substitute something like that when you turn up an oddball variant, like the castors that ended up under those 1A's. Pooley did some odd things as far as I'm concerned, and those castors are probably one of them. I'm not a very big fan of their cabinets as they always have issues (like warped panels and doors) that you just don't see very often in the cabinets that Victor and Edison made themselves once they stopped farming that work out. The later Pooley stuff is just fine, and they made nice radio cabinets so something must have changed in those years.

When you have that cabinet on its back, make sure you put a couple of coats of shellac on the bottom and also on the bottom edges of the sides and door. It will help keep the veneer in place down there. For whatever reason, Victor didn't even seal the bottoms of most of their cabinets and that's the main reason for all the loose veneer down there. The want of some sealer often causes the core-wood to shrink up and raise hell with the face veneer as well. You'll be surprised at how much shellac will wick into that dry wood under there. And replace any glue blocks that might have dropped off too as that will help keep those side panels from warping and pulling away from the bottom board. In Britain I heard an old guy call those glue block "rub joints" when I lived over there 35 years ago. He had a sense of humor, and the British are word-smiths, that's for sure.

[marcapra]

I have a Pooley cabinet in oak that is an Amberola 1A, but no problems with warping, etc. that you mentioned. The red mahogany Amberola 1A that I am working on now is not a Pooley cabinet, but a Herzog, which was the early furniture company that Edison fired because they didn't have enough cabinets ready for the 1909 Christmas season, which Edison had heavily advertised. No problem with the cabinet which is very sturdily made. Luckily for me, a young man on this forum Jwb88 had two casters that were close enough to mine that they work beautifully! These casters work so well that pushing the cabinet around is a breeze now. I oiled and greased the bearings on these antique casters of course. Both Jwb88 and I thought that his casters wouldn't work. My wheels were 1 3/16" in diameter, while his were 1 ⅜". His wheels were also a bit wider than mine. But because his casters didn't have a roller bearing cage, they were exactly right as to the height from the wheel to the mounting plate. The only thing that had to be modified were the stems, which were ⅜" wide on mine, but ½" wide on his casters. So I thought about it and rejected the idea drilling an oversize hole in my legs. So I decided to grind ⅛" off of the big casters stems. I did this so that there was just the right amount of interference fit. That way, I didn't have to screw the casters in to the wood leg. I put the bigger casters into the rear legs and now the cabinet rolls or even spins around effortlessly! Attached are some pics of his larger size casters that came off of an antique sofa.