Dear Member of The Secret Society of Lathe Trolls,
In many parts of the world, it's that bundling up, try to keep warm time of year. Certainly that's the case in Brooklyn, New York, where your virtual record-cutters' club is physically maintained. And 'tis the season that I humbly ask your help in keeping this site going. In supplying the firewood to fuel the next duration, so to speak.
I've decided to name our fundraising drives. Last year's crucial campaign is retroactively named "Charles Sumner Tainter", and this year's is named "Chichester Bell." C. Tainter, C. Bell and the more famous Alexander Graham Bell, as you may know, were the three young guys who spent the 1880's at the Volta Laboratory, taking Thomas Edison's rough miracle of a recording machine, and refining it until the speech being recorded was comprehensible. The result was the Graphophone. The recordings which manage to survive are a fantastic window into a world which feels both vastly removed from our own, and strangely alive by virtue of the palpable thrill of discovery in the grooves.
(see video at the bottom of the page)
Two-minute cylinder version:
If this site has been life-enriching to you, please take part now: Clicking the golden PayPal "Contribute" button at the top of this page will allow you to enter an amount you'd like to give. Or, PayPal to: lathetrolls@gmail.com. Please email or include a note to help me credit your username correctly on the “Our Sponsors” page.
A contribution of just $20 will make a big difference. If your business income or most meaningful hobby depends on the site, please consider more. For donations of $45 or more, you can customize your link, and also have it connect to a webpage outside the Lathe Trolls site. A checkmark at the Paypal page gives you the option of making a monthly contribution, too.
Your giving will keep this community, and this vital database of record-cutting knowledge, alive.
16" Radio Transcription 78rpm version:
[It's pretty similar to last year's message.]
I just renewed the domains and hosting of the Secret Society of Lathe Trolls chat forum for another year.
I also continued the backstage daily maintenance of the site, including attending to the needs of the now nearly 3000 registered users: Forgotten passwords, manual membership approvals, requests to edit posts or update image links, and the occasional offstage or onstage drama. Maintaining backups of the whole site.
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; operators of niche businesses; researchers; vinyl fanatics, and/or home tinkerers. 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; as some of you know, I started this site as a newbie, dissatisfied with the informational available to me at the time. (To some degree, I have remained a newbie!) Running the site takes diplomacy, triage, care, and both empathy and a thick skin. My maintenance hardware is a recently-purchased 2015 Mac laptop, and a tester smartphone, to make sure the site works in the mobile world.
Please help cover these site expenses, labor, and computer hardware, with an affordable financial contribution, at an amount of your choosing.
Good stuff you already know:
You are using the site, or you have enjoyed it at any point in the past 13 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!
As 2019 approaches, please help this site in its goal to help make this a good supportive year for you: a resource and a place of community, at the very least, in the unique niche it occupies.
Wishing you all a warm high end and pleasant dynamics,
Steve E.
Administrator
The Secret Society of Lathe Trolls
PS. Please post the link to this page:
https://www.lathetrolls.com/fundraiser
on the social media of your choice. Spread the word!