PAPER HORN "BALMAIN"

[emgcr]

That looks like an excellent solution Alastair---should work well. Perhaps use sealed bearings having replaced what is normally quite heavy grease with as light as possible or even just light oil ? Anything to reduce friction and therefore needle stress.

[JerryVan]

Hello again all, I have just looked out the possible suggestion, put forward by a very clever chap, ADRIAN Tuddenham, who sent me the following scan last year.
He is very keen on angled bearings, ( he says he has used them on a slightly similar application), and when we can meet up again, I think we will have lot to chat about regarding the building of the carriage mainly.
Thanks to you all, Alex that is a good suggestion, also Carlos, Inigo and Graham, and pardon me if I forgot anyone. Great to have so many ideas!Scan_20210228.png
The forum is really getting me interested in finishing this project, but I can see it being quite some time before it all comes together.
I am cobbling up a simple arrangement this week to try the horn out with a suitable soundbox attached, perhaps a Meltrope 2, Orchorsol or whatever!

If you use the ball bearing design, be sure to buy unsealed bearings. The seals will create drag. I would opt for unshielded bearings, and wash all the grease out of them. Replace the grease with very thin oil, or leave them dry.

[old country chemist]

Today my long suffering dear wife and I cobbled up some arrangement to try to play a few bars of a couple of gramophone records. She produced the other day, an extendable tripod arrangement, which I remember at one time had on top a large searchlight which she used when viewing moths against a white sheet at night! She also found an angled pipe, and between us we rigged up some 1 inch wide banding with anti-slip rubber webbing, to hold the horn at about it's balance point. I had made from my "Meccano" set a "needle guide pulley" arrangement which ran along a "Meccano" rail of several inches. Once all was assembled in a most Heath Robinson fashion, I put on an orchestral record, not a loud one, but which had individual instrumentations in it. We managed to get about six seconds out of the record before the needle guide pulley slipped off the rail-this item I thought would guide the needle in a straight line, but not for long! I used an H.M.V. no2 soundbox, medium steel needle. I thought the sound was clear, not particularly loud, and the sound not very impressive, BUT the bass response was good! I then put on a 1928 Columbia jazz dance record, and we managed about the same length of time, around 5 seconds, before the soundbox wanted to follow another path! This time the sound was clearer with a good, re-gasketted no4 H.M.V.( lipped gasket replaced by ordinary soundbox tubing), as per recommended by Carlos and Inigo.
I can see now how important it will be to manufacture the deck, plus the movable carriage of sorts-this item will I think, be the most difficult part to get right. I am making a scaled drawing 1cm to 1 ft. of the machine, to see what can be done with some of the suggestions put forward. Mr Tuddenham has sent me some new ideas regarding the needle drag rail, and it looks very interesting indeed.

[Inigo]

Seeing your temporary carriage, some ideas to make it work follow.... Just ideas to help!
1. Relocate the pulley rail base forward, so the pulley can follow the rail for a complete side. If seems that in the record starting position, the pulley is already at the end of its run!
2. Duplicate the arrangement, adding a symmetric device at the right side of the gramophone.
3. Maybe adding some weight to the pulleys, just over them, it will help them follow the rail better, forcing them against the rails.
4. The green long L Meccano bar seems a bit weak, too flexible against lateral loads (the drag of the groove against the needle will pull the arrangement towards the right side continuously, but with an irregular pulling force as the record progresses, due to the irregular friction). Why don't you try to build the frame using Meccano bars, bolts and right angles, trying to make it stiffer against these lateral forces...?

[JerryVan]

Maybe double up your Meccano rail with the addition of another, located above the roller, to loosely capture it between the two?

[old country chemist]

Thank you to Inigo and JerryVan for your two constructive ideas as to the workings of the NEEDLE DRAG ARM.
My longstanding gramophone friend, Adrian Tuddenham has sent me down a novel idea as to the makings of an alternative needle drag arm, using a flexible metal strip, clamped, and movable along a steel rod. This does away with the needle drag arm, but is probably not any easier to produce.

This design was used by Dr Voigt, the recording specialist with Edison Bell in the 1920s

[IainW]

Alastair. This is probably no help at all, but until you prefect your floating carriage in order to be able to play a record through, how about:
Erect a vertical barrier each side of the gramophone casing and use a single length of meccano with a bearing / wheel at each end to span between the two, attached to the soundbox end as at present. This should prevent the soundbox from moving sideways.
Support the soundbox end of the horn by putting a hook in the room ceiling (or better still the stairwell ceiling) and suspend this end of the horn using cat gut or similar with the hook centred at half way through the playing width of the record. The longer the suspension cord the less drag on the needle on the record groove sides. Adjusting the position of the gramophone deck relative to the ceiling hook to get the best result.
For this to work you will have to allow the gramophone lid to fold right back.
Just a thought - feel free to disregard as completely impractical!
Iain

[old country chemist]

Iain-your idea is interesting. I will put it to Mr Tuddenham in an e mail tonight, and get his thoughts on it. To be honest with you, He has thought up some rather unusual ways for the carriage to be transported., and for the needle drag mechanism. He is a clever chap, and if he cannot get to grips with something straight away, he will spend a while at the kitchen table, with a pencil, and doodle till he gets the answer! Your suggestion reminds me of a cartoon I did a while back, when I suggested a sky hook to support a horn of a machine!! He is also very good at listening to peoples ideas, and will often incorporate their ideas with his own, if possible.
Adrian Tuddenham is, I think now, interested in producing some of the mechanical bits involved in the making of my "Neo-Balmain" gramophone as he has a super lathe. He will most certainly make a much better job of the important bits than I ever could, even though I wanted originally the whole thing to be my own effort. I am now looking into collapsible strong wooden tables, not unlike the one pictured of the "Balmain" gramophone. The man next door is a carpenter, and may make a special table, tailor made for the apparatus. As I may have mentioned before, I need the whole apparatus to be dismountable, so the horn will come off the carriage , the gramophone cabinet will be unbolted, and the table will be collapsed to a reasonable size for packing away.
Thanks Iain-good to hear from you.

[IainW]

Just to get a bit more outlandish:
In order to do away with the 'ceiling hook' and make the apparatus portable it could be substituted by two hooks on a frame, in line with the longitudinal axis of the horn. The suspension cord, fixed to a hook at each end, could be provided with a floating block (pulley) which is attached to the soundbox end of the horn and incorporates a spring balance so that the needle load can be measured according to the tension in the suspension cord. The load will vary according to the locus of the floating block and will have to be optimised for variation throughout the travel from start to finish of record, by adjusting the position of the hooks and the tension in the suspension cord.
A similar suspension arrangement for the bulk of the horn should reduce the longitudinal effort necessary to move the horn while playing a side.
The extended sides to the gramophone case will still be required to prevent lateral movement.
I am afraid my nautical background may be showing with this rig. Interested to hear what you friend Mr Tuddenham makes of it.

[old country chemist]

Hi again, Iain, thanks for your new idea. In fact you and Adrian Tuddenham must be on the same wavelength! He suggested a very similar idea to yours involving cords and beam's to support the main part of the horn. He even sent me a sketch of it. The only drawback to this one, I imagine it a bit fiddly to assemble, and to to take apart, but it is a good idea. Sometimes I feel that I ought to get away from the ideas of Peter Heath and John Cook, as they produced the next best thing to an original Balmain. If Adrian is involved with this project, then I am sure it will be definitely different in more ways than one! Basically, I am not following the route of similarity to the original Balmain, but requiring some apparatus to be able to allow the horn to move along. The main thing is the quality of sound that (hopefully) will be as good as we can make it from a horn of 23inch diameter and 50 inches tall. I am thinking of altering one of my soundboxes to use principally on this machine.
Electronics and computerisation are things that I cannot get to grips with. Something mechanical is much more acceptable, I suppose that is why I have been "playing" with many gramophones and records now, since the early 1960s,- they're much easier to understand and to put right.