The Talking Machine Forum — For All Antique Phonographs & Recordings

I had to repair the horn assembly on my C-250 because the upper tube holding the reproducer was damaged.
The tube is soldered to horn in a butt joint with the ring as a decorative spacer. I made a metal jig to hold the horn bell in the exact position with regards to the upper tube. I removed the damaged upper tube assembly and replaced it with a good tube from a scrapped horn. The jig allowed me to align and hold the assembly together while I soldered it. Despite my alignment frame, there was still the testing in the cabinet a few times until it was just right.
I suspect Edison had a standard alignment jig to mass produce horns.

It was a lot of work but I have been happy with the machine for the last 18 years since I did my horn repair.

The downside was the loss of the gold plating. It was bad on my machine in any case and so I cleaned and polished the brass with the plating removed and coated it with a lacquer and none's the wiser. The main thing is it looks good, it is near perfectly aligned and tracks really well on playback. I will only recommend the resoldering if you are brave and fully prepared for this kind of work.

The weather finally cooled down enough to work in the garage again. I removed the horn from the machine and in addition to the horn stem being out of the collar the collar itself was only about 20% still attached the outside of the horn and very wobbly so of course my reproducer was not going to end up being in the right orientation. So, root cause of my issue is now understood: I got lucky and found a replacement horn assembly on eBay that had good gold plating and the Duncan wire on it so simply bought it and installed it and everything is perfect again. It was about the same price as a new propane tank, flux and silver solder (very expensive these days). At some point I may pursue repairing the original horn.

A happy ending and a nice C-250 that can move to the inside of the house soon: Thanks to those who offered advice on this topic. -Dan-