Gramophone Needles, British Made Too!

I went to the Lincoln traction engine rally today and returned with a working Gilbert of Sheffield wind up gramophone, of all things. It is almost identical to the one I used to listen to and play with as a small child in my grandparents house in the 1950's and when it was offered at a very reasonable price the power of nostalgia took over and compelled me to buy it. The reason was that as a teenager in the early 1960's I remember smashing up the original to get at the large clockwork motor when it was replaced by a more modern record player of the Dansette type. In hindsight I cannot believe I was allowed to do this but there was no use for these things back then and the family placed no value on it.

Anyway, being of the cabinet type my new acquisition will make a nice piece of furniture once it has been to the local French polisher. But the real point of this post is that, for a bit of amusement, I searched on eBay for some spare gramophone needles not expecting to find any such thing. I must admit that I was absolutely astounded to find needles are still available in a range of 'tones', and British made too!

I know British manufacturers have often been accused of not adapting to new products but I really didn't expect to find someone, somewhere, to be making gramophone needles and that there must be still a market for them. Do they have any other possible use, I wonder? I have long since discarded my CD collection and moved to Spotify Premium, although I know some people have reverted to vinyl. However, I am now going one better and regressing back to shellac!

Edited By Chris Crew on 19/08/2023 21:20:07

I have a couple of boxes of needles, must be decades old. They are used in a couple of shop-made scribers that I have around the workshop. Last for ages, easily sharpened up, they're my "go to" tools. I'm lost if I mislay one.

Another needle forms the point in my lathe-tool height gauge. Couldn't do without them!

As said above they make superb scribers!

Put one in the drill chuck of a mill-drill to quickly line up on a punch-mark or scribe mark.

You discarded your CDs? A lot of music is still published that way!

I had a similar experience with a wind up gramophone my Aunt had. I was so fascinated by it she gave it to me along with a few 78's. It was one of the more compact and portable types so didn't have the huge horn that the dog listened to in the "His Masters Voice" logo. It wasn't very loud and on investigation I found some paper had been stuffed up the horn. I pulled this out and was glad to find that they were plans for balsa and tissue model aircraft which I later constructed. I can't remember what happened to the gramophone but I think my parents "left it behind" in a house move.

I would have liked to see the machine that made the gramophone needles.

CS

If you want a real bit of fun, strip the clockwork motor down , remove the spring by unwinding it, clean it , oil it and replace it.

Plenty of swearing, cursing and wishing you never tried it ! How do I know ?

Bob

In my experience, springs of any kind are like Mother-in-laws, and should be left well alone !

Both can be "difficult" to deal with, to put it mildly , each being very sharp !

When I went to work at EMI in 1954 they were still making springs for wind up gramophones

The weathervane on the top of Head Office was of course Nipper

Lots of things you thought would not be available still are, i recently bought some paraffin blow lamp prickers

That is true and I accept that not everything is up on Spotify but I no longer wanted around 300 CD's taking up space in the lounge and the new laptop I bought doesn't even have a CD drive. I do still have a CD player in the Hi-Fi stack but usually just stick a USB lead into the computer from the DAC because there is no Bluetooth. I have a DAB bedside radio with Bluetooth so its very convenient to listen to Spotify from the smartphone app in the evening. Digressing a little, but personally, I cannot think why vinyl has re-emerged as an album format either because to me it's dreadful although not nearly as bad as a cassette which I have never owned. To me these formats are a bit like watching videos that were originally recorded on VHS or Beta, or even 8mm & 16mm film, on YouTube because that's the best we had 20 or more years ago but things have moved on and the technology has changed, for the better IMO but others will view things differently.