The Talking Machine Forum — For All Antique Phonographs & Recordings

I am having trouble finding appropriate replacement casters for my Diamond Disk A250. The old ones are completely shot.

The casters are set fairly deeply into a well drilled into the bottom of the legs. Unlike what I am finding in hardware stores and places like Amazon.com, the original casters rotate on a bearing mounted between the wheel and the shaft. And having the bearing structure just above the wheel means that the wheel is further out from the sockect, giving enough length for the wheel to clear the edges of the well in the leg. With the current ones, the whole assembly rotates inside the socket and there is no bearing. When you put a modern caster of the right wheel diameter in the socket, the wheels are too close to the edge of the leg well sides and won't turn.

Here is a picture of an original and a current model to make it a bit clearer.

So, the bottom line is, does anybody know of a good source for replacements of the original type?

Clay

Watch eBay, I have seen used phono casters offered there. The casters on my Brunswick look very similar. They might be fairly generic, I doubt many phono manufacturers made their own from scratch.

Yes, they likely were bought "off the shelf" back in the day, but seem uncommon now. These have a 1908 patent date.

Clay

Van Dykes offers a pretty wide variety of casters. Offhand I don't see the exact same one but there are a lot of old-style options that are a lot better than the standard hardware store options: http://www.vandykes.com/search.aspx?query=casters

I'd be surprized if George Vollema didn't have a stock of good originals on hand.`

The caster wheels on my C19 had worn to all different sizes, & 2 of them had bad flat spots, so a couple years ago I removed them, I turned my belt sander on it's back, and one by one I lowered each wheel onto the sandpaper on a 45 degree angle (holding them firmly by the metal spike), and let the wheel turn freely on the moving sandpaper. Slowly it ground the fibre? wheel down, getting rid of any flat spots as they turned, and I did all 4 until they were around the same size.
They ended up about the size of the original above, but they now turn freely & evenly, and I can even push the machine (full of records) around on our hideous 70's loop-pile carpet with ease. I could probably waltz with it on lino

I'll ask George. I have the motor and reproducer on the way to him now for servicing and to get a few other bits.

The wheels on these casters are different from any I've seen. There are metal disks on the sides with a spongy fiberous material between them that, I am guessing, was the underlay for outer "tires" of rubber or something. The "tires" have long since rotted away leaving the metal disks scrapping the floor.

Clay

George is looking for a good set. It turns out they are "Feltoid" casters. Below is an advert for them from 1911 I found on the net. This explains why there are remnants of a felt-like material still on them.

Clay

Search casters/castors on eBay, old ones cheap and plentiful. They are standard in size. Just be sure to get four that match. Often people will pull three of some furniture that is missing one then sell a box full of incomplete sets. It's frustrating to buy a box of 20 casters and find no four that match.

I don't think the ones for the A250, and some of the early Amberolas, are necessarily standard but could be wrong. Standard casters might fit the back legs but not work in front. The wheel size needs to be small so that it has freedom to swivel under the front legs which mostly cover the caster. To faciliate the swiveling, they also need to rest against a sort of plate with ball bearings inside.

Hope that makes sense...

Valecnik wrote:Standard casters might fit the back legs but not work in front. The wheel size needs to be small so that it has freedom to swivel under the front legs which mostly cover the caster. To faciliate the swiveling, they also need to rest against a sort of plate with ball bearings inside.

Hope that makes sense...

Yes, that is exactly it. The "sort of plate" you are referring to is actually an enclosed ball bearing assembly. Without that (which most modern casters do not have) the wheel goes too far up into the leg and won't swivel; instead catching on the sides of the well drilled into the bottom of the leg to conceal the caster.

Clay