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I went out today to follow up on a Craigslist posting tor two RCA Victor needle tins. What I came home with was two reasonably good condition Canadian Emile Berliner HMV needle tins (one medium tone and one soft tone, a battered Sphinx needle tin, an envelope of Peter Grey's Laboratories Kacti needles with twelve needles left, an envelope of Steel Craft half tone needles (only two left), and two strange single needles, types I do not recognise.

All the tins were full of unused needles. I suspect that the needles are not original to the tins, however, since they all look the same across all three tins.

Anyway the strange needles ... one has a spherical ball-shaped tip; the other has a very fine wire-like tip. What are they? Are they both tungstone-type needles, one worn out, the other still serviceable? Or are they something different?

Sorry for the lousy picture.

The wire tipped one is a used-up Tungs-Tone Needle.
http://www.victor-victrola.com/Needles.htm
http://alephnull.net/20s/victrola/victrola.html
http://badonoer.blogspot.com/2016/06/
viewtopic.php?t=39584

The other is possibly this ...
https://www.collectorsweekly.com/storie ... graph-path
http://pspatialaudio.com/Pathé_discs.htm

Those are used Tungstone / Tungstyle Needles.


Carlton Smith Indianapolis

Roaring20s wrote: Tue Feb 07, 2023 10:11 pm The wire tipped one is a used-up Tungs-Tone Needle.
http://www.victor-victrola.com/Needles.htm
http://alephnull.net/20s/victrola/victrola.html
http://badonoer.blogspot.com/2016/06/
viewtopic.php?t=39584

The other is possibly this ...
https://www.collectorsweekly.com/storie ... graph-path
http://pspatialaudio.com/Pathé_discs.htm

electrolaman 64 wrote: Wed Feb 08, 2023 8:34 am Those are used Tungstone / Tungstyle Needles.


Carlton Smith Indianapolis

Thank you both for the replies.

A closer examination of the needle with the ball-shaped end using a jeweller's loupe shows that it is indeed a tungsten-type needle with the wire tip entirely gone. It has a bit of polish/wear on its end, as if it has been used for some other purpose. Who knows what?

Not ever having seen a Tungstone needle before, other than in pictures which do not give a clear close-up view of the wire tip, I wonder how one knows when the tip is used up. The needle in the photo above has a much greater length of wire than the length of of the 78 needle on the cantilever of a magnetic phono cartridge. The tip of the wire shows no evidence of wear on any side more than any other. I suppose I could try it on a beater record before it goes into my personal museum of used needle types.