The Talking Machine Forum — For All Antique Phonographs & Recordings

So I drove home today and naturally had to make a few stops at antique stores I've never been too. The first stop was at a GIGANTIC mall in Virginia which was mostly full of junk. But as I round the last corner I spot an Edison Home! Excited I walk over and it looks on first inspection to be pretty typical... the case is dirty and the decal is pretty nice. When I lifted the lid it started to get worse, the top half of the casting wasn't bolted down and the japanning was in pretty rough shape. I looked at the price tag and it was $249... "no crank". Sometimes the cranks can end up inside, so I lifted up the motor board and found this:

Anyways, this was without a doubt one of the worst phonographs I have ever found in the wild. I tried to offer $20 for it just so I could have some fun and see if would even be possible to get it running without replacement parts. But then I got some BS story about how they're not allowed to call the dealers about their items. So I just left. But I thought you guys would at least get a kick out of this

But checkout the cool receipt that is glued onto the lid! Apparently it was purchased March 25th 1905 for $30. Also not sure what was going on with the mandrel... seems like someone milled a slot and drillled/countersunk a hole into it... for what reason?

Cheers,

David

Yikes!
I can smell it from here.

James.

Mouse Motel...
- Bill

Rather sure I know the answer, but were the records any good?

Steve

That IS pretty rough. But zooming in on the one picture, the Edison C reproducer looks pretty decent with a stylus. That's at least a hundred bucks right there if the stylus is good. And the carriage for this Edison model A Banner Home is an early style carriage with the roller wheel which is generally more interesting to most collectors versus the more common and later Edison Home carriage without the roller. The horn is almost certainly original (albeit rough) and even if the cylinders are shot, the boxes and lids have a little value. I would have offered at least $100 - $125 for this just to get the reproducer and horn. But it sounds like the seller wants what they're asking - or close to it if the middle person you spoke with is not allowed to contact dealers with offers. Which itself is very odd.

The inside of the cabinet with that mouse nest reminds me of about 25 years ago when there was an on-site auction in a small town in New Hampshire with lots of phonographs. My good friend and I got up really early and made the long 4 hour drive to attend the auction. We got lost a bit and ended up only able to preview the phonographs (inside a barn and some were outside) for about 15 minutes before the auction.

One phonograph was a beautiful original Victor MS. I vividly recall looking it over and remarking to my friend that I wanted to bid for sure on it. There was no crank. Then I moved the tonearm aside and released the motor board button to examine the motor. AAACHHH! The entire inside of the cabinet was filled with mouse dung and particulate exactly like the inside of this Edison Home. It smelled horrible too. I quickly closed it up and decided that I was no longer interested unless it sold very reasonably. It didn't. I'm sure the high bidder never looked inside the cabinet as I did.

Doug

Yes the model C was nice (it actually had a mica diaphragm too) and there were some decent parts left on the machine. But since the seller showed zero interest in working with me i just decided to leave.

And the records were priced at $11 each and were so incredibly moldy that you couldn't even see the grooves . So the whole lot was in pretty sad condition haha. There was actually a second lot of cylinders on the other side of the store, but the price and condition were exactly the same as this lot. $11 for a box seems a bit steep to me

Cheers,

David

But it has providence. Here appears to be the seller in the 1910 Census for Virgil NY:

Intrigued by that mandrel slot, which doesn't look like Uncle Bubba's work to my eye, I did a Google image search to see if anything similar might crop up with an explanation.

Oh, I got an explanation, all right. Here's what Artificial Intelligence had to say:

"This appears to be a component of an industrial machine, possibly a horizontal form fill and seal (HFFS) pouching machine, such as a Bartelt IM series model. The exact model and specifications are uncertain due to the general nature of the image and lack of specific identifying information in the search results."

Gotta love AI--an accurate, dependable answer every time! :

Hey, I bet that mandrel came off a Dictaphone or something -- it's a hunch but I just saw one in an antique shop which also had slotted mandrel.