Rare Pathé Stentor G Variation (Concert and 2 & 4 Min. Standard)

[-juergen-]

Below a few pictures of a machine acquired by chance by a fellow collector for me. When he called me and said, "I saw a 2 & 4 minute Stentor for about 400 euros at one dealer on the antique market," my answer was, "Such a model is not existing at all”.

Pictures showed me that I was fully wrong, and my friend bought it for me.

There are a some Pathé Stentors known based on Graphophone GG patents/ drawings and only a few based on Edison Concert patent/ drawing. The model span goes from A to G within about one year. For A, B and G advertisings are available and I am not sure if all models found a way in some advertisings or catalogues. I think those items have been build together by order and mostly they were very individual. All models were brought to the market in 1899/1900.
I then tried to get a rough overview of known versions of the Stentor and it seems that we are not talking about real series production.
The Model A is shown here: https://grammophon-platten.de/e107_plug ... hp?48205.0

The case needed some time and attention by a professional restorer, and the 2 & 4 minute gearing was broken and blocked. The H sound box and a defective C sound box were included.

The concert mandrel, a B sound box, the bell, bell holder, and "Edison" carriages were missing. The nickel-plated carriage was mounted to be used for the standard mandrel.

Assuming the body was an Edison Concert painted for or by Pathé, I tried to find parts and, as an experiment, removed the carriage from one of my Edison Concerts to determine if it would fit well on this model.
It turned out that none of my Edison Concert carriage arms didn't fit to the machine. The clearance between the underside of the carriage and the Concert mandrel/ cylinder is too small to play a Concert cylinder. The casting above and below the bedplate of that Stentor G differs slightly from the Edison Concert castings.
Most of the deviations are minor, such as the size of the serial number block or the diameter of the speed adjustment screw. The restricting difference here is the clearance height above the mandrel. There is a deviation of about 3 mm between an Edison Concert and the Stentor. This means that the mandrel axis on the Pathé Stentor G is siting about 2-3 millimeters higher than the axis on an Edison Concert.

This indicates that the casting was most probably made by Pathé based on an Edison license and adapted to the Stentor carriages at the same time which. I do not believe that Edison casted a few dozen different bed and motor plates for a European company.

A fellow collector in the USA was able to allocate and buy a carriage arm. Various 2 & 4 minute sets where available on Ebay USA. In Belgium a collector had a Pathé Concert Slip-on Mandrel, the horn is a large Pathé horn from France designed for that sort of machine. Sound boxes were in in my spares box. In the meantime, a friend in Bamberg organized the case restoration. Unfortunately, the mounted 2 & 4 minute gearing couldn't be disassembled and the first spindle with 2 & 4 Min. gearing I bought was too short.
Meanwhile I now know that there are at least three different lengths for 2 & 4 minute drives/ spindles. After having the correct length, it was possible to saw out the old spindle and gearing and assemble the parts in the same way the machine was set up when bought by my friend at the antiques market.

I'll probably never find the original carriage arm that Pathé used for this machine when brought to the market (like the GG arm). If any of you have such a spares carriage arm at home, I'd be happy to hear about it. In the meantime, concert cylinders run in a “non – catalogue” concept as you see here.

The restoration is in accordance the modifications of the previous owner (to play 2- and 4-minute standard cylinders) done and in working order, and I'm also able to play concert cylinders again.