DIY

MUSIC

THE MACHINIST’S

PHONOGRAPH

This time-tripping player handles all cylinder record formats. By Royston Maybery

Photography by Royston Maybery

When Edison invented the phonograph in 1877, he envisioned it as a business dictation machine. But it soon became a popular medium for music, recorded onto durable cylinders that are still available and playable today. Cylinders came in a wide variety of formats — 2¼", 3½", or 5" in diameter, 4" or 6" long, 120rpm–160rpm, 100 or 200 grooves per inch — most of which required different types of phonographs to play.

Today there’s one specialty machine, the Archeophone, that can handle all formats of cylinder recordings, but it costs more than $16,000. So

I decided to build my own, and being a licensed machinist, I call it the Machinist’s Phonograph.

Design

Physically speaking, cylinder phonographs need to do 2 things: turn the cylinder record itself, and turn the screw that leads the tone arm along the cylinder’s spiral groove at the proper speed. My phonograph uses a double belt drive to accomplish both tasks. One belt runs from the motor to the shaft carrying the cylinder, and a second belt connects that shaft to another one, which turns the lead screw.

The challenge was figuring out how to accommodate all cylinder formats. For the different speeds, I calibrated the motor pulley diameters to give the drive shaft a maximum speed of 170rpm,

Make: 141