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
