Not too happy to see this in the first spring barrel I've ever taken apart... Judging by the grease, someone (fairly professional by the looks of it) repaired at least one broken spring in the Vic 3. I haven't taken apart the other spring barrel, but I hope it's not the same way. It seems to be riveted together (and probably the source of quite a bit of noise in the motor). Anyone else run into stuff like this? I think it's pretty neat to find old, old repairs.
Yeah, I've run into several of those, but usually on British or Indian (tropical) HMV machines. I think it was a fairly common repair when and where replacement springs were hard to get. Reiss actually talks about it in his book, "The Compleat Talking Machine." Whenever I encounter those, I throw them away and replace them. On one Indian HMV 2 spring machine, both springs had been spliced, one of them in 2 separate places.
I think the more of them you do, the more weird stuff you will see. The worst thing I have ever seen was a spring that was broken at the inner coil. The previous repairer poured molten lead into the center coil to fuse the broken spring.
Dave D
I pretty well understand that... Think that nowadays it's pretty easy to find new springs, you only have to Google for them from the comfort of your chair. Despite having gramophone repair services in every town in the era, not all people had the money to go there and ask for a repair work. And later, maybe from late fifties on, it became impossible! Until now.
My grandpa's gramophone stopped forever sometime in 195... just because the local phono repair services in Madrid (many many music stores) had quitted by then the 'old clockwork' gramophones line, and were only devoted to fully electrical players. So it was near impossible in that epoch of 'throw away the old and attach to the new' to get a gramophone repaired. Not in other european countries, but this was so in Madrid. Maybe in smaller towns the business was continued by some small local dealers that hated that tendency... had stock of repair parts, and will do the work, but I bet those were a small bunch!
I visited in the 1980s many old music stores in Madrid, and found only one this style. They still had lots of NOS 78s because the old owner hated the idea of throwing all them to the trash, as all others did when the microgroove arrived. And all that stock was available for sale in 1980s, pristine new, and at the very same last price they had when removed from the catalogues. .. which in 1980 was a real bargain! Pity I was then a poor student with little pocket money, and I only could go there from time to time and get three or four of them.
On my last visit (199x?) they almost had run out of the stock, as one record dealer had also found that treasure and bought almost all of it. Nevertheless, they still kept a box of gramophone parts, which I bought, including a working viva tonal soundbox, needles, a crank and other small bits.
So I can imagine that some people with ability and tooling made these repair works. Then, besides that, the manhour of work was far cheaper than the cost of materials, and this fact favors the abundance of emergency repair work like those many riveted springs. In times of places with few resources, imagination and ability were a must!
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