PATCHING UP A VICTOR R

A nice Victor Model R "Royal" was brought in for a minimal cost patch job.    The mechanical part was easy, one of the three governor springs and weight assemblies had a screw come out of one end.   The screw was in the bottom of the case, so putting it back was easy.

After that was done, the turntable did not have enough torque to play a record.   This is a simple spring motor, so I thought maybe it needed to be cleaned and greased.   Did that.   Not much improvement.   The spring seemed to have lost much of its tension.   The short term solution was to decrease the needle pressure, by adding a counterbalance to the  horn, thus getting by with a reduced motor torque.

Rule #1, is do not make irreversible changes, so I made a small clip to hang the weight on.   If a proper restoration is made in the future, this can be removed and no sign it ever existed will remain.

                                The Edison Standard Phonograph

The Edison Standard is a spring driven external horn phonograph model, that was introduced by Edison's National Phonograph Company, in April, 1899.   It sold for $20, but remember you were lucky to make $1 per day at the time.

We were given a good working one a couple of years ago and already had a non-functioning one.   Since the building is space limited, it seemed wise to sell one of them.

In order to sell one, it has to work.  So we decided to fix the broken one and sell it.   There were two main problems.   The spring was broken about 3 turns from the inner end.   The C reproducer  needed a lot of help.  We don't do reproducers, so we sent it out for repair.   The spring is simple, but as you probably know, it is dangerous to replace a spring if you are inexperienced at this job.   There was also a chipped tooth on one gear, which had to be replaced.

We got it all taken care of in early July of 2017 and will be sale shortly, but there is no horn to go with it, as they are readily available in reproduction form.