The Secret Society of Lathe Trolls

Thanks concretecowboy and petermontg, I'll try to keep your points in mind. You're right of course about taking cheap shots at people I don't know about, and for that I apologize. We're all doing what we can to keep our heads above water and money in the till. Instead of focusing on any person's fai...

Heh, I got a chuckle over that guy's line, "If you truly want to go it alone, you can. I offer up my intellectual property..." I guess he must have invented both the RIAA curve and the op amp.

My point is that a fully re-conditioned lathe means a fully re-conditioned lathe... In some American schools you can get on the honor roll just by showing up to class - actually doing your homework is optional, and often unnecessary to get an "A". (edit for clarification) Is that "merit inflation" ...

Peter and KTG, thanks for the leads. I did find the needed parts around the WWW, but will keep the NTE190 in mind if ever I blow up the Motorola parts I'm getting in. As you recommend, I will be fusing the drive coil leads, at least until I'm done getting the machine back up and aligned. A cooked $1...

Perhaps you're right, but due to the feedback network in the 1700 electronics, an open circuit to the record head can cause other problems. Today, while doing machine setup, I smoked both the Westrex 1703 record coil power amps by inadvertently applying high amplitude sweep waveforms from my generat...

100% analog is no big deal, it's like saying a board was nailed with a 100% hammer. Of course the advance feed audio doesn't have to be analog. Just start a digital playback a couple seconds before your analog tape machine and you're good to go. In my studio I keep a hawt 21 year old intern around, ...

From what I've read here and elsewhere, the reason for helium is that it is a better heat conductor than air. Considering that the Westrex 3DII head with the 1700 amplifier was originally designed to run without any sort of forced gas cooling (and the gas line is an upgrade to an already successful ...

I'm refurbishing a Scully lathe with Westrex head & electronics this week, and will be putting up photos and videos shortly. Here's a photo of the lathe with the cutting head carriage removed, exposing the rails and rear trolley support wheel, and showing the forward and reverse feed screws. As you ...

I'm refurbishing a Scully lathe with Westrex 3DIIa. It has what appears to be a cooling line for compressed gas; I'm not going to set it up with helium, but may run it with compressed air.

The Spencer microscope is just like a Bausch & Lomb, Zeiss or Leitz of the same era; the same microscope body is found on the basic lab microscope of the same era. Spencer was bought out by American Optical (AO), which rebadged the Spencer scope & supplied Scully's later models. You can find perhaps...

Note that some heads have a resonance at high frequencies that influence their behavior. Our Westrex 3DII-a has two resonances in each channel; one resultant from the drive coil, about 13 KHz (IIRC?) and another about 11KHz(?) from the feedback coil.

Curious. A Vinylium cutting head on a Neumann lathe - kind of like putting a Kia engine in a Mercedes, no?

Add plenty of garlic to y... oh, you said Presto?

Never mind.

Hi, I'm Robert Hughes in Minneapolis. And I'm a techie, soon-to-be lathe troll. My pal Ralph has a Scully lathe with Westrex head & electronics, and we're about to bring this classic machine back into commercial service. I've heard the Lathe Trolls forum is the place to be for record cutters, so her...