Advice on Castors?

[Lah Ca]

I bought a set of ancient gramophone castors the other day. They were cheap, and they looked like the ones I have seen in pictures of Aeolian Vocalian machines. My AV machine has no castors.

The castors were quite badly rusted, and the wheels and ball races were mostly seized up.

They soaked in POR15 rust remover overnight.

Everything is loosened up now, and the rust is mostly gone.

The cosmetic results are not pretty, however. The metal is very badly pitted.

I will take some steel wool to them now to clean them up a bit more, and then see what they look like with multiple applications of gun bluing.

Any other suggestions or ideas?

Thanks.

[Lah Ca]

These are not my castors but are what mine looked like--identical Bassick model. I do not, however, have the grommets, if that is the correct term for the sleeve that goes into the wood.

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These are what mine look like now after their rust remover bath, a water rinse, and a bit of steel wool touch up. They are basking in the sun to keep them drying

You can see how pitted some of them are.

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One of them was obviously dragged around with a seized up wheel over something like concrete. There is a flat spot in the wheel, and you can see that the wheel has a wooden core. The flat spot was not so apparent initially with all the crud that was on it.

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Bassick, a company founded in 1878, is still in existence, albeit perhaps only as a corporate name for product labelling. Here you can see one of my castors posing with a great, great grand descendant.

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[Roaring20s]

Nice job, they cleaned-up nicely.
A light spray of dark bronze colored paint will hide the pitting.
To protect your floors, I'd fill in the pictured large hole on the wheel bottom, the glue a thin grey colored felt around the wheels.

James.

[JerryVan]

Lubricate your casters with castor oil.

[JeffR1]

With a small spade style cutting head on the Dremel tool to scuff that area up and the wood core for support, some JB Weld should work very well there.
Some careful filling to make it round.

[Lah Ca]

Lubricate your casters with castor oil.

Very funny. (No sarcasm here.) It is very funny.

Castor is, according to my Oxford English Dictionary, an appropriate, albeit far less common, spelling variant of Caster--if by caster we mean a small swivel wheel on the leg of a chair, table, etc, which we do here.

I suppose I could fall back on this uncommon usage as a defence, claiming that I knew what I was doing, but I would be telling a lie.

I have struggled with spelling all my life. Despite being an avid reader since childhood, I have no visual images of words. Hence I tended to spell phonetically, something that did not serve me well in school, especially with the peculiarities of English spelling. I am mildly dyslexic or, perhaps, more accurately dysgraphic. In addition to general spelling challenges, I struggle with letter and number sequence reversals in writing.

XT computers were the start of a salvation of sorts. They allowed me to develop kinetic memories of keyboard movements for many words. And then there was the highly mixed blessing of spellcheck. If I am handwriting something, I think of keyboard movements to guide spelling.

My trusty 486 DX4 100 with MS DOS 6.22 and MS Word 6.0 for DOS got me through grad school, at or near the top of the class with a number of nominations and honourable mentions, if not actual awards, for best grad papers.

I just had to work harder than most everyone else. Proof read. Proof read. Proof read.

[JerryVan]

Lubricate your casters with castor oil.

Very funny. (No sarcasm here.) It is very funny.

Castor is, according to my Oxford English Dictionary, an appropriate, albeit far less common, spelling variant of Caster--if by caster we mean a small swivel wheel on the leg of a chair, table, etc, which we do here.

I suppose I could fall back on this uncommon usage as a defence, claiming that I knew what I was doing, but I would be telling a lie.

I have struggled with spelling all my life. Despite being an avid reader since childhood, I have no visual images of words. Hence I tended to spell phonetically, something that did not serve me well in school, especially with the peculiarities of English spelling. I am mildly dyslexic or, perhaps, more accurately dysgraphic. In addition to general spelling challenges, I struggle with letter and number sequence reversals in writing.

XT computers were the start of a salvation of sorts. They allowed me to develop kinetic memories of keyboard movements for many words. And then there was the highly mixed blessing of spellcheck. If I am handwriting something, I think of keyboard movements to guide spelling.

My trusty 486 DX4 100 with MS DOS 6.22 and MS Word 6.0 for DOS got me through grad school, at or near the top of the class with a number of nominations and honourable mentions, if not actual awards, for best grad papers.

I just had to work harder than most everyone else. Proof read. Proof read. Proof read.

I'm happy that you took it in the spirit that was intended. I would have never mentioned with sarcasm in mind.

[Lah Ca]

The damaged caster (or castor ) now with the JB Weld patch, posing next to the worn-out, purpose-built sanding tool.

I am wondering about the wisdom of mixing up another bit of JB Weld, spreading it thinly on a piece of plastic, rolling the caster through it to coat the surface of the wheel, and then re-sanding the dried finish smooth. The wheel is quite pitted. There would a lot of footholds for the epoxy to hold onto.

[JeffR1]

If the pits are clean it will stick.
Clean the castor in lacquer thinner with a small stainless brush to get into the pits as best as possible.
The cured JB Weld will not be effected by the thinner.

If you roll it on a smooth surface as it is now, is it very out of round ?

[Lah Ca]

If the pits are clean it will stick.
Clean the castor in lacquer thinner with a small stainless brush to get into the pits as best as possible.
The cured JB Weld will not be effected by the thinner.

Thanks for the reply.

I will try this. I think I have some lacquer thinner in my garage at the back of a cabinet.

If you roll it on a smooth surface as it is now, is it very out of round ?

It is quite in round--the sanding tool ensured this outcome. However, there is still one small impact dent on the opposite side of the wheel that I should probably fill in. The dent does not affect the rolling much but it is noticeable and would probably be more noticeable under the weight of the AV machine, not that I plan to be rolling the machine around on these castors over the hardwood floor on which it sits anyway. The vintage castor project here is mostly for show/display, not function. If I wanted function, I would put modern sensible castors on the machine--I have a drawer containing a number of perfectly fine salvaged sets. The machine with its vintage castors finally installed will probably sit with floor-protective furniture cups under its wheels.

After mulling things over, I think I will try "painting" the JB Weld onto the wheel with a soldering flux brush, rather than rolling the wheel through it. The bristles of the brush are stiff enough that I should be able to work the epoxy down into the pits while at the same time getting a fairly even coat over the wheel. If this works well, I will try the same on the other wheels, as well.

A light spray of dark bronze colored paint will hide the pitting.
To protect your floors, I'd fill in the pictured large hole on the wheel bottom, the glue a thin grey colored felt around the wheels.

James.

I like Roaring20s' idea of the felt strips and the dark bronze paint. After the rolling surfaces of the wheels are done, I will probably mask these surfaces off along with the shafts, paint the castors with something like Krylon hammered dark bronze (which should "sort of" match the tarnished look of the ferrules on the ends of the AV machine's legs), and then apply a final coat of JB Weld to the rolling surfaces and fuse the felt into the JB Weld while it is still tacky.