The Talking Machine Forum — For All Antique Phonographs & Recordings

I just put an add in the Trader section for a free horn I made as a stand in while I waited for the real thing to turn up someplace. It was fun to make and made me really consider the engineering that went into phonograph construction.

Which leads me to a question for the board...

Has anyone made their own phonograph? I know some collectors make hi tech cylinder players for digital playback.

Just curious.

I recall that Francious made a homemade cabinet for his Edison Disc parts to fit into. Are you talking using existing parts, or completely from scratch? As an experiment many years ago I had a early Fun for Boys Book by Popular Mechanics I think it was, they had a very simple plan for a horn that used a needle stuck though the end of the horn which rode on a spindle with a cardboard platter. I was very young, but I recall how cool it was that it actually made sound you could understand if you turned the center stem just so. I have considered doing something on the order of Francious only more like a simple furniture set up that could maybe include several types of horns and motors in one unit, or maybe just a edison disc machine to get the horn level down more to the console height.

I made myself a front mount machine which I use to play my Berliners. I used steak knife handles for the corner columns & a long cardboard horn that takes the weight off the soundbox. It doesn't look the best, but it sounds pretty good considering what it is.
I'm planning on making some sort of weird beast, using the 2 DD horns I've got under the house one of these days. I've got about 50 real projects to finish first though
I've always liked the idea of installing a gramophone into an old commode chair too lol.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAjlhPJFjy0[/youtube]

gramophoneshane wrote:I've always liked the idea of installing a gramophone into an old commode chair too lol.

Well, until you are able to make sure your commode machine is adjusted properly make sure you only play your crap disks on it!! LOL!! Sorry I couldn't resist that one

RJ

gramophoneshane wrote:I've always liked the idea of installing a gramophone into an old commode chair too lol.

So was that the origin of the term ‘crapophone’?

(Sorry, couldn’t resist.)

— MordEth

MordEth wrote:So was that the origin of the term ‘crapophone’?

They're cheap knock-offs of the Merdephone which was also sold in Italy as the Strunz and marketed in the US as the No. 2.

Rear mount, of course!

Has anyone made their own phonograph? I know some collectors make hi tech cylinder players for digital playback.

Just curious.

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A few years ago, I posted a question on Phonoland concerning what I consider to be the ultimate home-made gramophone.

Quite awhile later, an actual photograph appeared on the Gramophone forum:

Sheringham Hall Gramophone

I remember, going back about 20 years, reading about other home-made gramophones designed by British hobbyists. All were of the exponential horn type.

While I never built an entire gramophone from scratch, I did try to make my own exponential horn, following a very simple formula published in a circa 1930 edition of the "Gramophone Handbook." (Wished I still had that book!)

It was a non-folded horn, about six feet long, made of wire coated with several layers of papier-mâché which I slapped together in the middle of my living room floor. (The apartment I lived in at the time did not have a work room.) The small end was about five inches in diameter, while the large end was about 3 feet.

To test it, I removed the grille from my Consolette and inserted the small end of the horn directly into the Consolette's horn, as far as it would go, and then sealed around it with foam rubber and grease. The results were surprisingly good, though the volume was rather soft, since I had not coated the horn with any sealant at that point. The bass was about what one would hear from a Credenza.

I had planned to seal it and test it further, but within about a day, the papier-mâché surface began to crumble--apparently, I hadn't gotten the recipe quite right--and it caused such a mess that I decided to give up on the idea.

Ortho_Fan wrote:While I never built an entire gramophone from scratch, I did try to make my own exponential horn...

Do you have any photos of this attempt or the unfortunate aftermath?

I’d be curious to see them, even if it didn’t work. Perhaps you might inspire someone else to have a go at papier-mâché horn-building.

— MordEth

MordEth wrote: Do you have any photos of this attempt or the unfortunate aftermath?

I’d be curious to see them, even if it didn’t work. Perhaps you might inspire someone else to have a go at papier-mâché horn-building.

— MordEth

Unfortunately, no. That actually goes back to 1989. I remember that I did this just days before the Loma Prieta Earthquake,which, in and of itself, makes for an interesting Victrola-related story...

But, if you can imagine a stretched out EMG/Ginn horn, that's about what it looked like--only crumbly .

A basic (exponential horn) formula is provided on this page, though the one I used was much simpler. -- http://www.gramophone.net/Issue/Page/Ju ... /40/835382

(You have to log-in to the site as a member in order to view the PDF file. Membership is free, and it provides access to a treasure trove of historical information.)

Here's the first page of the article, which I was able to download, that describes the exponential horn formula: