The Talking Machine Forum — For All Antique Phonographs & Recordings

I'm always on the hunt to look for more cylinder cabinets to put my tabletop machines on, but they are hard to find out "in the wild" and can be a bit pricey. I've been thinking of buying sheet music cabinets and old dressers to create drawers for cylinders, maybe even with pegs. has anyone done this for either cylinders or discs? Would love to see some well done repurposed cabinets.

Martin

I prefer to keep my cylinders in boxes, so I've never been interested in cabinets with pegs. I have mine in various types of dressers. They're organized by company, playing time, and record number.

In the past, I converted a sheet music cabinet for disc record use. They work very well and have the look that goes with a phonograph. Now that I have acquired a few disc cabinets, I use one for cylinders.


Pictured below I use plastic shoe boxes to hold my wax cylinders and they act like binders for disc records. Just pull out a box and play them. Also pictured are small cases that are used for my blue amberols. James.

Because the decline of the cylinder happened much more quickly in the UK than in the USA, we hardly ever see purpose built cylinder storage cabinets.
Personally I detest the cabinets with pegs, because they are responsible for the loss of so many original cylinder boxes.
My cylinders are stored in a chest of drawers, on which two machines sit side by side.

I also favour using chests of drawers, although I also use cheap cardboard boxes.
The first one is actually an art deco shirt press, although my ex's aunty used it as her glory box.
The drawers are a perfect size for cylinders, and the top shelf holds a couple boxes.
I can get 60-65 cylinders in the 4 drawers of this one. And a couple others.
Both of these have top drawers not deep enough for cylinders, so I use them to house some spare reproducers, adaptor rings, different phonograph manuals, spare carriages etc, and a bunch of spare lids, and boxes of spare blank labels I've printed out.
The first one holds 45 BA's per drawer, and the second holds 60 wax cylinders per drawer.
And these boxes house my non-Edison cylinders, like Edison Bell, Sterling, White, Clarion, Indestructible etc etc.

I also have an English Oak cabinet that I made from an old wardrobe, but it's still packed away in my shipping container unfortunately. I use it to house some of the boxes.
I plan to make drawers for it some day though because I hate shuffling through stacks of boxes.

I like to use barrister bookcases. Smaller machines like a Columbia B or Q can be stored inside with the cylinders and larger cylinder machines sit on top. Like the cylinder machines, they can be found in Oak or Mahogany. Mine tend to be multi-purpose, because I also use them to store books and other objects that I collect, like early cameras. A tall barrister also allows my larger horns to be overhead, (good use of space).

There seems to be many more surviving machines than there are cylinder cabinets. My thought is that most of the machines sat on a table, shelf, mantle or bookcase. My barristers are also from the correct period and it is a win-win for me, because I collect barristers.

An antique server or lingerie chest work well to.

I'm cheap so I used a 1980s or '90s wooden cabinet originally for holding VHS tapes or something. The back is braced with plywood and the front doors are glass. It's a fine-looking cabinet; not quality craftsmanship like the antiques but look, I'm trying to move out of the house anyway come August and finish college, so I don't want a bunch of really nice furniture to have to worry aobut. There are enough shelves in there to fit as many cylinders in there as I like. Also, I have a wooden suitcase from 1900 to 1902 that has original pegs in it to hold cylinders. It's great; I just put 24 of my Blue Amberols in it, usually. Right now it is holding all my 2-minute Indestructible Records and some BA's.

But as the Fireside has been out of service for a while due to a messed-up reproducer I have not needed to access wax records and have been using the 4-minute stuff only.

As far as antique dressers & sheet music cabinets I'd probably want to try using them for their intended purpose.

gramophoneshane wrote: The first one is actually an art deco shirt press, although my ex's aunty used it as her glory box.

Sorry Mate, you lost me with that Aussie lingo... What in the world is a "glory box"? I can only think that it's a place to put a deceased family member's ashes... after they've gone off to "glory"...

I have two cabinets in active service. One was bought to go in a Chinoiserie decor guest bedroom but has since migrated upstairs to the music room, where I keep my cylinder player. It has shallow drawers that are nearly the perfect depth for a single layer of cylinders but that are not quite the right width and depth for perfectly efficient packing; I built a storage unit with three sliders for the large, open top compartment. The other is an African-style elephant themed cabinet with 12 narrow drawers, each of which can hold 13 cylinders stacked in double ranks.

Curt A wrote:

gramophoneshane wrote: The first one is actually an art deco shirt press, although my ex's aunty used it as her glory box.

Sorry Mate, you lost me with that Aussie lingo... What in the world is a "glory box"? I can only think that it's a place to put a deceased family member's ashes... after they've gone off to "glory"...

The Cambridge dictionary definition is "for clothes, sheets etc that a young woman traditionally collects for use after she is married."