The Secret Society of Lathe Trolls

Dear Reader,

If you are here, you are a probably a recent or longtime participant in The Secret Society of Lathe Trolls, the grassroots worldwide chat forum devoted to all aspects of record cutting and pressing, professional and experimental. If this site has enriched your life, please contribute now to our 16th anniversary fundraiser. It will allow me, the admin of the site, to continue to serve you behind the scenes, and to pay the site's service expenses. Details of what your contribution supports are further down the page.

Please contribute now to keep the Lathe Trolls site running.

Clicking this golden PayPal "Contribute" link, or the golden button at the top of any page of www.lathetrolls.com, will allow you to enter any amount you'd like to give (one time, or monthly). Or, PayPal to lathetrolls@gmail.com. Please email or include a note to help me link/credit your username correctly on the "Our Sponsors" page. (The paypal page will read "Doc Wurly." That's me: I repair Wurlitzer Electric Pianos from my Brooklyn apartment, while I'm not rewiring the site.)

All contributions fund our hosting and domain expenses, and support my labor keeping the site operational.

A contribution of $20 USD will make a big difference. Smaller amounts ($16.66 or $7.80, for example) will add up, as long as everyone pulls their weight. If your business income or most meaningful hobby depends on the site, please consider more: $33.33 USD is a magic number. For donations of $45 or more, you can customize your link, and also have it connect to a webpage outside the Lathe Trolls site. Banner ads are available for $78 on up--email me for details, or read this link. A checkmark at the Paypal page gives you the option of making a monthly contribution, too. (This is a great option if your cash flow is low and your allegiance is high). Your giving will keep this community, and this vital database of record-cutting knowledge, alive.

As you know, this one-of-a-kind site runs without major support. We don’t have fees: neither for membership, nor even, as of now, for the "Classifieds & Tip-offs" section listings. All we have are your friends and you: quirky brilliant individuals; proprietors of niche businesses; expert operators of mastering and pressing equipment; researchers; vinyl fanatics, and/or professional and home tinkerers and inventors. You are the Lathe Trolls. You make the site worth visiting. I, with your help, and with the generous volunteer efforts of our moderators, keep it functioning.

This administration is generally performed and/or refereed by this one guy writing you: a freelance musician, Wurlitzer Electric Piano repairman, and audio editor living in Brooklyn. Ironically, I am not a professional record-cutter. I started this site in June 2005 as a newbie, dissatisfied with the information available to me at the time. (To some degree, I have remained a newbie!) Running the site takes diplomacy, triage, care, some tech skill, and both empathy and a thick skin.


The recent duration in review

It's been a heck of a year-plus for all of us. I don't need to spell out the causes. We've been living through it.

Most of our Lathe Trolls members have had to shift priorities and enact some emergency maneuvering. Some needed to change career paths, at least temporarily, to get through it all. I imagine that for some, the struggles have led to unexpected blessings. Others are still in the thick of it. In the wake of it all, we grieved the loss of a few beloved longtime members of the community, among the other personal bereavements many of us sustained.

Throughout this time, it is my hope that the community at Lathe Trolls has been a source of strength, support and enjoyable distraction. The site intends to continue for the foreseeable future-- as long as its members can chip in and support its operating expenses.

I skipped our usual November fundraiser; I figured everyone needed a break, but the site's needs did not go away.

Good stuff you already know:

You are using the site, or you have enjoyed it at any point in the past 16 years, as an enthusiastic sharer or lurker; as a giver or consumer of knowledge and equipment, related to the making of old-fashioned grooved records.

• LatheTrolls.com enables the passing on of record-creating knowledge and experience that had been on the verge of being lost.

• It encourages innovation, while aiding in the salvage and repair of irreplaceable older equipment.

• It showcases vinyl art.

• It singularly promotes businesses in this reviving industry, offers problem-solving data and schematics for everything from old home units, to Neumann VMS-80s, to the new exciting record cutting and pressing solutions.

• It helps sellers and buyers of equipment--both common and unobtanium-- find each other.

• It is a unique, invaluable, deep, massive, sprawling database of the world's living knowledge of record-cutting and record-pressing.

• Its users volunteer, daily, to solve the most maddening of technical problems.

• It connects record-making professionals, living engineering legends, and hobbyists on every continent on the planet. And...

• It's fun!

Your contribution will specifically fund:

• Domain and hosting related service expenses, including backup services, and advanced firewall services to block Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. These expenses have crept up in recent years. A year ago around January, swarms of bots caused the site to go down several times, and I've had to employ a cybersecurity service since then to block them.

• My work on the site, which is time-consuming. It is a labor of love, but it still needs funding to happen. I manually approve every new user; approximately 1000 users over the past two years, totaling 4100 active memberships. I also deal with forgotten passwords, requests to edit posts or update image links, and the occasional offstage or onstage drama. Maintaining additional manual backups of the whole site.

• I must keep the site software up-to-date to function with the latest server requirements. Every couple of years, I have to reprogram the site more-or-less from scratch, and migrate the old data to a new shell, just to keep it looking and operating the same with evolving server software upgrades.

• You may have noticed some periods of site outages in recent months. Every time you experience this on the front end, I am thrown into action on the back end, sometimes spending days on my computer and phone troubleshooting the latest hosting-provider glitch. As of late, I'm exploring options on another migration of the site, in the hopes of finding some more reliable service. All of this takes time, smart decision making, and a lot of effort.

Your contribution literally allows the site to continue to function.

I regret that since this is such a manual operation, I have not always followed through efficiently with the individual "Thank you" mail message that you deserve--even though, I am loudly thanking you over here when your contribution arrives. What I DO do, though, is thank all sponsors and financial supporters of the site on the "Our Sponsors" page, accessible on a button at the top of the page. (Check it out!) At the time of new fundraisers, I archive older sponsorships, but they remain readable by links. Your support is memorialized permanently.

The contributions of the past 15 months have been belatedly named the Margaret Watts Hughes drive, and the current fundraiser is named for Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. Respectively, they invented the Eidophone and the Phonautograph, both devices that allowed sound waves to be visually recorded. The 1857 Phonautograph, as you may know, is the source of the earliest recordings we have, although they were not playable until recent times. The Eidophone of the 1890's, a device that looked like a bong with a membrane, showed modes of vibration in a variation on Chladni figures; it also produced gorgeous voice-activated paintings, as seen below. Google 'em!

Thanks for your ongoing support.

Yours in all peaceful revolutions,

Steve E.
Administrator
The Secret Society of Lathe Trolls

PS. Please share this link on the social media of your choice. Spread the word!

https://www.lathetrolls.com/fundraiser