For many long years, J. I. Agnew has been examining, adjusting, repairing and replacing bearing systems of all kinds, from disk recording lathes and turntables to tape machines, high precision machine tools, measurement instruments, industrial equipment and all manners of motor vehicles, from passenger cars to heavy trucks. Over the past few years, he has designed and machined countless bearing units to replace worn or damaged units on a diverse range of disk recording lathes and machine tools. Valuable experience was gained, which along with his solid engineering background, was put to good use in improving his designs further and further, up until the current stage of development was reached.
Neumann cutter heads have a rib along the back, for mounting. Presto lathes, on the other hand, together with the vast majority of non-Neumann vintage lathes (Rek-O-Kut, Fairchild, etc.), have a mount with two slots, for cutter heads with two threaded holes on the back (Audax, Presto, Fairchild, RCA, etc).
We recently had the pleasure of having Symatic over, from Bristol, UK, for a week of training on how to cut (and how not to cut) records.
Symatic runs Cut & Paste Records, a record label attracting some serious attention among skratchers, with high quality releases of skipless skratch samples, lock-groove tones, beats, and relevant music.
All Hardinge HLV and HLV-H variants feature a continuously variable speed drive to the spindle. It starts with a 3-phase, two speed squirrel cage induction motor, rated at 500 rpm and 1500 rpm nominal (less in practice, due to slip) at 50 Hz. This would be 600 rpm and 1800 rpm at 60 Hz.
Finding a Hardinge HLV can be challenging enough, especially if, like us, you happen to be located in Europe. At 1400 lbs, shipping and handling gets complicated. In a previous post, we described the joys of forklifting the beast onto a platform trolley (with suitable structural support added to the building), to get it to the workshop, though narrow corridors and doorways. Once there, it had to be lifted off the trolley and placed directly on the floor. With no chance of being able to drive the period-correct forklift truck into the shop, we had to get creative. A hydraulic engine hoist along with slings and tacks got the job done neatly. With the lathe on the floor and properly leveled, it was time to check it over, replacing, adjusting, lubricating and cleaning parts along the way!
Happy new year! Time to reveal what has been secretly developing in the lab throughout the past year: A stereophonic cutter head of an entirely unique design, invented by J. I. Agnew during his work with experimental transducers for measurement and testing purposes.
Back in 2015, we started a big lathe project, taking a beat-up Fairchild lathe from the 1930's, fitting it with an RCA cutter head, and eventually going full-on with a stereophonic feedback cutter head, vacuum clamp-down platter and automatically variable pitch.
