WANTED: Non-potmetal trunnion assembly for Columbia AT

[phonogal]

Clay, Do all the Type 2 AT's have pot metal? Thanks, Jan

[phonogfp]

It's a Type 1, serial # 214331; it has an early style #2 reproducer on it, and a 'Broadway' decal.

Incidentally, I remember seeing an AT on Tim Fabrizio's site a few years ago that had an (original?) brass carriage; its serial # was 210614 - so it seems the switch was made sometime shortly afterward.

Bill

I can confirm that at least by the early 214,000s the AT carriages were pot metal. No.214317 is here (just 14 earlier than Bill's!) and retains its original pot metal carriage. (It was swollen/seized when found in a shop 25 years ago, but I repaired it and it's been fine ever since.)

Hazelcorn's comment should have read "It should be noted that early in the production run of the first style 'AT', Columbia switched to pot metal for the carriage sleeve assembly." My upper casting is not pot metal, so I suspect the carriages were made from pot metal for awhile before the upper castings went to it.

George P.

[FloridaClay]

Hello everyone. I wanted to bring you the rest of the story, as the late Paul Harvey used to say.

As you may recall, I have a Columbia AT with the dreaded potmetal trunnion assembly, which broke at several points. Despite some valiant efforts by Jean Paul to repair it, it was just too brittle and never held.

I picked up a really nice nickel-plated solid brass assembly from an A in hope that it would work. Despite reassembly of its parts in various permutations I could not get it to work properly and set it aside until after the holidays.

Fast forward to yesterday when a thoughtful member of the Forum sent me a PM giving me a heads up that there was a non-potmetal trunnion sleeve listed on eBay. It was just the prod I needed. I put the AT back on the kitchen counter (what passes for my work bench in my condo) with the thought that I would examine the picture of the one on eBay to see if it might solve the dilemma.

This led to some further experimentation with the bits I already had and SUCCESS. The solution turned out to be combining parts from the 2 assemblies. I took the lift-lever ring (which fortunately is also brass) and the parts from the bottom of the potmetal assembly that engage with the feed screw and substituted them in for the equivalent parts on the all brass assembly. Eureka!! Keeping my fingers crossed that the large Y-shaped part on the bottom does not fail, because it seems to be potmetal, but it looks fairly sound and the machine now plays like a champ.

Thanks to all that commiserated with me and gave advice on this journey.

[fran604g]

Congratulations for the success!

Are you going to take some pictures for us?

Fran

[FloridaClay]

Congratulations for the success!

Are you going to take some pictures for us?

Fran

Well, the good news is that it just looks normal, and plays normally, again.

Clay

[fran604g]

Very nice Clay, thanks for the pictures!

There will be an AT in my future, and an A, and an AO, and a BF or BK or BV and another and another...probably take years, but it'll happen sooner or later, provided I live long enough, that is.