The Talking Machine Forum — For All Antique Phonographs & Recordings

Don Wilson's Stollwerck replicas are nothing short of amazing! Every single detail of the originals are faithfully captured. It's great to have records that can be played without fear of breaking a rare, fragile and expensive original.

TinfoilPhono wrote:Don Wilson's Stollwerck replicas are nothing short of amazing! Every single detail of the originals are faithfully captured. It's great to have records that can be played without fear of breaking a rare, fragile and expensive original.

The originals were made of chocolate right? It’s amazing someone has 115 year old chocolate somewhere!

Reminds me of this YouTube channel called “New England Wildlife And More” where he opens up cans and boxes of really old food and sometimes eats it! :

Some originals were chocolate, but Stollwerck also offered the small 1903 discs in a wax compound they called 'karbin.' Most survivors today are wax. I have heard of surviving chocolate ones, but I have never seen one. And I've been told by Jalal Aro in Paris that the only chocolate ones he has ever seen were too moldy to play. Stollwerck sold the chocolate and wax versions at the same price.

The larger discs from 1904 were made of a pressboard material with a very thin layer of wax on top. Those were never made in chocolate. Unfortunately the thin laminate layer tends to crack and flake so they are risky to play.

EDIT to add: when I was in Paris a month ago and visited Jalal, he showed me a box that had contained about 20 chocolate records, each in its individual box (a copy of which is shown in my photo above). About half of these small boxes remained but they were all empty -- no records. What amazed me was that when he took off the lid of the large box and had me smell the inside, it still carried a clear and surprisingly strong chocolate smell!

This project has been a lot of fun and hopefully the upcoming chocolate copies also workout. In the meantime, I hope you've had a chance to play the polyurethane copies. Those ones are durable enough that they may outlast us

I'd love to see real chocolate, playable records. What do you think they will sell for?

Will you be offering brown celluloid Stollwerck records to the public?

MTPhono wrote:I'd love to see real chocolate, playable records. What do you think they will sell for?

Will you be offering brown celluloid Stollwerck records to the public?

I'm happy to make the discs in any color you like.

I have no idea what chocolate ones will sell for, it all depends on cost of materials and labor. I'm hoping to keep them around $20. And they will of course be made in food grade molds.

One of the key technical challenges will be casting the hot, liquid chocolate. Hot liquids don't generally have problems with air bubbles (unlike room temp liquids) but they tend to shrink a lot as they cool and solidify. This may require making extra molds, stretching or swelling them ~5%, casting a slightly larger copy and then making another mold from the larger copy.