My Recordette story

[noisebrothel]

Hey Trolls, I've recently bought a Wilcox-Gay Recordette off ebay and thought I'd share my experience. Hopefully it will at least give a bit more insight for anyone looking to toss some money down on trying to get one working.

I've always been interested in dub plates and lathe cut records having been producing music for quite a while. After having a handful of my own tracks cut to dubs over the years I got the bug and wanted to see if I could do it myself. Then I found the lathe trolls board. So this is my first step down the home cutting route.

Had been looking at some ebay listings for a while, but most cutters were way more than I wanted to spend, as I was just trying to get into this for the fun of it. Eventually found one that was non-working, looking like it was from an estate sale and hadn't been touched for years. At $25 bucks the auction ended and it was mine.

It arrived in the condition as promised, looking like a dogs breakfast. It didn't turn on, the microphone sounded like it had a family of spiders living in when shaken, and the crystal had the same situation. Oh, and no cutting needle.

Off to a good start. Gave it a good cleaning, but who knows what I contracted cleaning out the 60 year old grime and beetle carcases. Found that one of the tubes were missing after I had taken the electronics from the case. Figured that was it for my cutting adventure, until I heard something rolling around between the platter and electronics. Sure enough, it was the missing tube. Plugged 'er in and everything fired up. The radio worked, the worm drive working the cutting head engaged properly (after a good cleaning), and even the mono rca input worked when I hooked up the iPod.

At this point I was gonna make this baby work, so the next step was to find a working crystal and cutting needle. Found out through this forum I would need a Shure W56N or equivalent. Piece of cake. The internet has to have everything. Sure enough, after a bit of googling I found an electronics supplier in seattle that had a deadstock W56N. Another $12 bucks later and it was mine.

Here's the URL where I got the crystal http://electronicsupplycorp.com/.

He seems to have quite a bit of old phono and electronic equipment, but the online ordering doesn't seem to really work. So you may have to email him if you find any other gems on the site.

So after that I started cutting on a bunch of different materials, cds, plastic plates, anything else that could spin and be cut into. CDs have seemed to be the best material so far, but still don't play back super well on a standard turntable. I knew fidelity wasn't going to be super going into it, so I'm happy I've even gotten this far.

I've recently bought 5 dub plates from Apollo masters and will see how those bad boys turn out once I get a chance to cut some more. I've attached photos of the Recordette, as well as a scan of the Shure W56N cartridge instructions and packaging. Don't know if its super helpful to anyone, but every piece we can put together on these things helps out.

Thanks for reading if you've made it this far. Glad to contribute!
Pete

[audadvnc]

Nice cleanup on that machine!

[tragwag]

would you mind going into more detail about the crystal cartridge replacement you did?
I'm very intrigued.
I have a meissner recorder and I'd love to get a working head on it.

[noisebrothel]

I tried cracking the old crystal open that it came with, just to see what was going on and if it could be fixed at all. Once I got it open, it was literally dust and chunks that fell out of it, so whatever was in there just deteriorated. Figured I was in trouble unless I could find a good replacement, which I did from the Electronic Supply corp. Kind of took a gamble on buying it since it was an old stock crystal, not refurbished or anything. Attached it and worked like a champ. Unfortunately don't have any real technical information about the crystal itself though, just got lucky really!