The Talking Machine Forum — For All Antique Phonographs & Recordings

I've posted about this before, but have been curious to see if there's a way it can be identified. The discovery of the 1927 Curry's catalog and some of the other nice phonographs on this website make me wonder if there is hope yet to find what it is.

Here's a not-great photo. The motor & other parts are not original--I just had an old motor I was checking about putting in, and thought, rather than build a frankenphone, why not see what this was originally, and try to build it back as an original.

In America it is very hard to find English phonographs that aren't ruined. This one was made into a frankenphone using 1980s English cereal boxes & the destruction of a 1929 153a Grafonola. I sold off the Columbia parts, and was curious would it be possible to identify it or at least find a motor board, horn, tone arm, and reproducer that would go in. I don't know if it was a Garrard or Collaro motor, off-brand or something like a Gilbert, or even what this thing was other than at one time it played music.

Honestly, I'm not sure if even the front door should open for records or if the cabinet on it was always a top-loader.

If it gives a clue, the lid support is exactly like on a Gilbert Geisha? You lift the lid a bit and it toggles and lets itself down.

If anyone wants, I can try to get some better pictures. There may be some delay as it's finals week.

Any help is very much appreciated. Thanks guys.

I think you'll need a picture of the whole machine, including legs, before anyone can even take a guess at who may have been the manufacturer of the machine.

I quite like these oak British (typically very low, btw) machines. I have one and the left door is false, but someone must have thought it was real and yanked it off before I found it. Luckily it was still with the machine. If the hardware matches the right side (hinges, mostly) then yours was probably intended to open. If not, maybe someone made it operable later.

The left "door" on my machine was obviously held in place with nails and so I reinstalled it that way. I did however consider making it an operable door, but the opening would only have been about 10" tall, maybe even less, so getting records in/out vertically would be difficult.

This could be a fun project. Hope it's identifiable.

looks like a Gilbert model 60 , but with no name in the lid ?

In the absence of any name inside the lid, this may be what we in the UK call a furniture shop gramophone. In the 1920's there were dozens of small firms turning out cabinets, which they fitted out with bought in mechanical components from trade suppliers. Some major retailers put their own name inside the lid, but many did not.

I would probably sum it up as a locally made machine by a smaller cabinet maker. Epigramophones description is likely to be quite correct. Even when a name is present on the cabinet it's often difficult to find much, if anything, about it. The motor and hardware could be almost anything... British, Swiss. So it's just a case of finding something that fits.

I suspect that some of the Currys cabinet machines were made by several cabinet makers and this may account for why a certain model appears different in each illustration. It's even possible your machine could be another variation of their Nelson cabinet machine.