Excelsior Cylinder Player

Once-upon-a-time, before there was streaming, and SACDs, and CDs, and vinyl records, and 78 RPM shellac disks, there were cylinders.

I’m part-way through a three-part lecture at the local museum on the history of recorded sound. A portion of Part 1 was to talk about cylinders, and I was lucky enough to meet a local collector who owned a number of cylinder players, one of which he loaned to me for a demonstration.

After some back-and-forth, he agreed to sell me the player to add to my collection. And, after a little (but very little) internal debate, I decided to do a partial restoration as a little weekend project.

The player is about 120 years old, so there’s plenty of dirt and oxide on it. My goal was not to make it as-good-as-new, rather to just clean it up a little.

The easiest part was polishing the screw heads. I made a small brass handle to make this easier…
Before and after polishing one of the steel rods that are used to support the sled.
The various parts of the speed governor, dismantled, and ready for polishing.
Back together again after polishing
The cast-iron base before stripping the paint.
The end support for the two arms and the threaded rod that moves the sled in sync with the groove on the cylinder, before stripping. Note the professional decorative artwork…
The support arm for the speed governor before stripping.
The sled before polishing.
Most of the steel and brass bits and pieces after polishing.
The belt on the top left of the photo is made of thin leather.
The original wooden knob for the brake cracked sometime in the past 120 years. So, I made a new one from Cumberland ebonite. I didn’t feel too bad about using this instead of wood, since ebonite was a common material for such things back in those days. The reason I have it on hand is for making fountain pens and replacement parts in restorations.

The last part of the restoration was to hammer and rub out the dents in the bell, and to spend an hour or two sanding the surface with 800-grit paper, and then polishing on a wheel.

After everything went back together, the only thing left to do was to make a wooden base so that the cast iron won’t scratch anything. Rather than try to re-create the original base and cover, I just made a simple one from teak.

The player is NOT sitting on an anti-gravity device. It’s floating above the concrete because it’s sitting on a piece of wood to keep the sand off it before bringing it inside. Note that equally-amateurish decorative paint job on the end piece. I debated making a computer-generated stencil and spray-painting a “perfect” decoration, but I chose to do this instead, in keeping with the original.

“How does it sound?” you ask. I did this recording before the restoration, but you can decide for yourself. Note that, back then, the player still wasn’t mine, and I was hesitant to wind it up enough to play a full two minutes… Hence the rescue mission half-way through.

Now I have to go find some more cylinders. That one is the only one I have, and I’m getting a little tired of “In the Wildwood Where the Bluebells Grew”…