Greetings from Canada!
I've been reading around the forum and watching lots of Youtube videos and have been intrigued by the process of cutting my own records.
I recently purchased a Meissner 9-1065 record cutter to play around with for only $75. I know it is no where close to a good cutter but I don't have a lot of options at the moment based on my location and budget constraints right now (I live in the middle of nowhere and it's a 4 hour drive to the nearest city over 10k people).
It's not in the best of shape but it's not terrible either. Some rusted out screws and some damage to the outer cloth case.
I've pulled it apart to examine the state of the electronics and everything surprisingly looks pretty "good" (nothing appears to be corroded or broken) besides the rotting power cord).
I've replaced the old power cord now with a PC power cable. A friend that restores vintage tube radios recommended I put a 3 prong plug on and have done so (was that a bad idea?).
I ran the ground to the drive motor casing as the drive motor casing already had a wire that was soldered to the main chassis for ground (also maybe a bad idea that may introduce noise?).
So with a new power cable installed of course I had to turn it on and see if anything popped!
To my surprise my house did not burn down! So far that's a win for me.
Radio seems to work but there are no AM stations in my area (truely the middle of nowhere). My vintage radio buddy does have a personal AM transmitter that I am going to try to see if it picks anything up.
Turn table is functioning in both the 33 and 78 modes.
There seems to be a blueish type of corrosion on both the recording and playback heads, I'm assuming that's the crusty crystals causing that.
I've read West-tech can rebuild these for me if I desire. But a few have posted that they no longer service these heads. (their website also doesn't tell me much or even have a contact listed)
I may have a crack at rebuilding them myself by acquiring a crystal or maybe trying to use a piezo? I also will eventually look at seeing if I can install a magnetic cutting head instead, I'm not opposed to making this into a frankenlathe (maybe somehow get it to emboss instead of cut?).
One thing I was reading is the LPI on these is rather small. after taking it apart it appears to just follow in the thread of a spinning bolt. Maybe that can be replaced with a finer thread pitched bolt to acquire a better LPI?
I've also ordered a Gakken record cutter out of Japan after the success I've seen Markrob have with his and his modifications. I have both FDM and resin printers to work with for modifying both the Meissner and the Gakken.
To be clear I'm not expecting to get any sort of hi-fi sound out of either cutter. I'm just a tinkerer and thought this would be a fun hobby to get into and wanna see how far I can take it on a budget.
If anyone has any comments, suggestions or advice let me know I'd love to hear! I have managed to pull up the manual scans floating around, the Riders troubleshooting and photofact already due to this wonderful forum.