The Talking Machine Forum — For All Antique Phonographs & Recordings

This " takes the cake" but it rang a bell with me and I dug through my old copies of the Hillandale News ( City of London Phonograph and Gramophone Society journal) and in the December 1977 issue a collector named Mark Field wrote and article called From Scrap to Fireside. He bought the bedplate and not much else for two pounds from a scrap metal dealer and proceeded to restore the machine to its former glory.You can see the process in the illustrations. The rigamarole he went through to get the gears to run smoothly would curl one's hair. He is a machinist, of course, but even so! And the re-enameling process was like a spiritual exercise.
So there really are no completely lost causes. Sort of.

Steve wrote:
Jim, are you sure that wasn't MIKE Field? Just wondering, as I know him and this is very typical of his work. If you gave him a washer from an Edison Opera, he'd make the rest of the machine to wrap around it! As well as being one of the CLPGS best kept secrets over the years, he's also a local man to me.