Progress on Reproduction K&R Gramophone

[donniej]

A year or so ago Mark Caruana-Dingli had contacted me about 5" Berliner discs, this led down a proverbial rabbit hole that I recently fell back into...
Mark wrote a wonderful short book on the Kammer & Reinhardt Berliner machines, with tons of great pics. I immediately ordered a copy and later followed up, asking if he knew where I could get access to a machine to copy. He put me in touch with Dave Homewood (in the UK) who had already examined many machines and had drafted a detailed set of blueprints. Dave was extremely generous and sent the blueprints, 1:1 scale drawings of all parts and this (black and gold) paper mache horn which he had made. It was incredibly kind of him and I'm very grateful to find people like him.
The drawing and blueprints were sufficient to have a designer render them in CAD and have them 3D printed (at my expense). After a few revisions I came up with the machine in the pic below, which is close but not quite there. There's also the issue of building a reproducer which I don't believe can be cast out or polyurethane or epoxy, but will need to be machined out of brass. With the goal of making an affordable machine, the reproducer is proving to be a problem.
The quarantine and work had both recently been grinding at me and I took the opportunity to mix it up by building the mold for this horn. It's the first "slush mold" or rotocast mold I've made and it was an interesting project. A video showing how to make thisstyle mold will follow, as I have a chance to edit the clips.
A big thanks again to Mark Caruana-Dingli and especially Dave Homewood for helping to make this happen.

[VanEpsFan1914]

This is just awesome.

I won't be ordering one-- can't justify the price of something this well-crafted that I'll likely not use. I'm more of a 1900s-1930s kind of collector. But it is great to see another gramophone coming back.

[Victrolacollector]

That’s awesome! I realize that they are not cheap to build. If you can get enough to build, and they are at a low enough price, I would love to buy one.