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Hi folks,

A post on the "Antique Phonograph Enthusiasts" wall included this picture from ad that was on Craigslist. After seeing this picture, I became quite curious. I looked at some of TAE's patents regarding the development of the DD Reproducer and his drawings clearly show a joint, but they also showed the joint was a flange fastened with screws.

I don't want to get into the ad link, I'd rather keep this topic on the Machines forum for informative purposes.

Have any of you, with great experience involving these DD Reproducers, seen anything similar?

Does the joint where the sound connecting tube meets the Reproducer body come unattached easily? Do the earlier Reproducers have a very different joint than the latter models?

Is the joint a press fit, snap fit, threaded or brazed/soldered?

Here's a picture of the suspect:

As I understand it, the heads are soldered to the tubes and can be heated up and rotated. In fact, one of the famous rebuilders, whose name escapes me would heat the joint and slightly rotate the head in order to improve the tracking angle. Why someone would rotate it 180 degrees is beyond me, although it could work just as well that way. I will say I've never seen this before.

Jim

phonojim wrote:As I understand it, the heads are soldered to the tubes and can be heated up and rotated. In fact, one of the famous rebuilders, whose name escapes me would heat the joint and slightly rotate the head in order to improve the tracking angle. Why someone would rotate it 180 degrees is beyond me, although it could work just as well that way. I will say I've never seen this before.

Jim

You're thinking of the late Mr. Waltrip, who would alter these to have the slightly canted angle that the later Long Play repros had.

I would think 180 degree rotation would be a bad idea. Wouldn't it cause the stylus to dig into the record slightly?

Thank you, gentlemen!

52089 wrote:You're thinking of the late Mr. Waltrip, who would alter these to have the slightly canted angle that the later Long Play repros had.

I would think 180 degree rotation would be a bad idea. Wouldn't it cause the stylus to dig into the record slightly?

That's what I was thinking, pushing the Re-Creation into the front of the stylus would cause considerable problems just from the mechanical perspective, I would think.

Fran

Well, I am certainly not a DD reproducer expert.
Quite the opposite, in fact. I am a rank beginner,
having only just started this past June, 2014.

However, since that time I have obtained a spare
DD reproducer to use and to experiment with on my
newly acquired C-250 DD machine.

I've had both of those reproducers apart and together
again many, many times to test various original
Edison styli, "Expert" styli from the U.K., along with
a selection of various old DD diaphragms, some of which
I made new links for.

Along the way, I've found out a few tricks, such as a
handy and very quick way to adjust the pivot on the back
to be free, yet have very little (if any) vertical
slop.

Unsoldering and rotating the portion of a DD reproducer
that houses the diaphragm seems like a bad idea to me. That (to me) falls under the category of second-guessing how the Edison factory set these things up when they were new.

From time to time, we see various instances of this
sort of thing. One other example of it is a claim
made that altering the travel of the weight on a recorder
to be much more than factory spec. can use more of the
recording blank down to a smaller diameter. Maybe true.
But that comes at the expense of allowing the angle
of the recorder cutter to change way out of the range
it was originally set up to move through. 2nd guessing
Edison. Not a good idea in my opinion because I tend
to think he knew what he was doing.

Chuck

I'd like to see it play a record. It would surely mutilate it.

I picked up a DD machine some years back with a steel needle soldered into the point. Hugely bad idea!

Maybe this machine was on its way to becoming a Blue Amberol player?

martinola wrote:Maybe this machine was on its way to becoming a Blue Amberol player?

Or maybe it needs an exorcism?

Probably a demonstration machine, so they can run the reproducer on the other side of the record, like we see so often on photographs. Wait, that doesn't work with a DD horn attached.

Andreas

It looks weird to me!! edisonplayer