Hey there--
We've all seen the cardboard records with the plastic coatings...
Just out of curiosity--would it be possible to cut a sound groove onto a record blank made from posterboard with a laminated covering...?
Would anyone want to experiment..? I'd be willing to provide the blanks.
--Curley-Ann
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Curley-Ann
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Curley-Ann
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Perisphere
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- Location: Mountain Home, Arkansas
I did a number of these in 1979 using wet paint. I used a broken talking machine's sound box to make a crude recording head (using a transistor radio speaker); a steel needle made the groove in the wet paint.
I could get about one minute of sound onto these things at 78 rpm. After the paint dried you could play them back. And they still sound as bad as the day they were made....
I could get about one minute of sound onto these things at 78 rpm. After the paint dried you could play them back. And they still sound as bad as the day they were made....
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Aussie0zborn
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Curley-Ann
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Curley-Ann
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Perisphere
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What I made these records with was made from bits of the remains of an Orthophonic Victrola. All I was given was the induction disc motor and the board it was mounted on, and the board next to it on which the tone arm was mounted. On that board was the tone arm and its pot metal sound box. (The uncle who gave me all this told me the rest of the cabinet was eaten up by wormwood....all the sadder as it was one of the big Credenza models.)Steve E. wrote:Do you still have the cutting head? I'd love to see that. It LOOKS great.
The diaphragm was trashed....a 2 1/4" speaker fit inside nicely in its place. I used either a bit of a toothpick or an old steel needle and bits of glue to couple the end of the arm to the center of the speaker.
The rear of the speaker's magnet had to be epoxied to the part of the sound box that fits onto the tone arm.
Needless to say, connected to about a 10 watt amp (bass turned way down, the treble pot maxed), that 2 1/4" speaker didn't last too long! I went through several of them....
As for the records themselves....this all goes back to a memory of an accident with a screwdriver that got dropped onto the side of a freshly-painted car kit body when I was 5 years old. The tip of the screwdriver (flat-blade) glanced off the body, but left a fine groove where it plowed through the paint.
I have always been fascinated by records and cutting them--I'd love nothing more than to be working doing lathe cuts....anyway, one experiment I tried in late 1978 (I was 14 then) involved spraying enamel paint onto the coated, glossy side of a disc I'd cut from some old posterboard, allowing the paint to dry, then trying to scratch a groove into the painted surface with the above homebrew head. What works for a pie crust is no good for a record....the results were more flakes than grooves. I had made a crude chisel point onto a steel needle....didn't properly remember what I'd seen in a recording studio on a real cutting stylus.
The early part of the summer of 1979 (by now 15) I started experimenting again. One experiment involved trying to lubricate the paint with some WD40 on a paper towel....but eventually I ended up with just the wet paint onto the glossy side of posterboard. (Had to be the glossy side--the paint just soaked into the fibres of the reverse side.) The stylus for these wet paint discs was just a normal steel gramophone needle.
I never had a proper lathe or mechanism. All the feeding of the head was me crouched over the thing, moving it very slowly by hand. I could do lead in and lead out spirals, and a few times I even stacked up several discs and offset a wet disc just so, and made an eccentric groove at the end.
I made the mistake of taking some of the discs to school later on....nobody believed they worked. (Consider I was far from popular, so had lots of time on my hands at home to do things like make these records!) I had one person ask me if I could put Ted Nugent onto one of them, another asked me if I could do 45s. (No and no.)
Nobody ever asked me if I could do stereo on them (no again)....
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Curley-Ann
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Ahhhhhh...your story reminds me a lot of myself!
I caught the record-bug very early in life. I went with my father to a second-hand store one day and this red disc caught my eye. I picked it up and was fascinated that I could see THROUGH it! (I had seen records before--my folks had an old 3-speed box phonograph and several LP's...but this was the first 78 I had ever seen).
I bought it for a quarter--and that started my love and fascination for 78's!
(I still have that record to this very day--it's a red vinyl Majestic by Alfred Newman and the Hollywood bowl Symphony Orch. playing "Jealousy")
But...after that initial record, I KNEW that one day I would HAVE to have my OWN efforts preserved onto 78!
I caught the record-bug very early in life. I went with my father to a second-hand store one day and this red disc caught my eye. I picked it up and was fascinated that I could see THROUGH it! (I had seen records before--my folks had an old 3-speed box phonograph and several LP's...but this was the first 78 I had ever seen).
I bought it for a quarter--and that started my love and fascination for 78's!
(I still have that record to this very day--it's a red vinyl Majestic by Alfred Newman and the Hollywood bowl Symphony Orch. playing "Jealousy")
But...after that initial record, I KNEW that one day I would HAVE to have my OWN efforts preserved onto 78!
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Curley-Ann
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Curley-Ann
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