11 Feb 2012

Homemade 45rpm disc recording

Handmade disc recording made on a coffee tin plastic lid
Whilst clearing out a cupboard the other day I chanced upon a piece of my history in the form of a small 45rpm disc recording that an old school friend and I made in 1969. Using an old record turntable with a very large horn as the acoustic microphone we recorded me saying some words and poems onto the polypropylene lid of an old coffee jar. Shouting VERY loudly, the sound is imprinted onto the disc in just the same way old gramophone records were made back in the 1800s. The metal foil inner lids of cocoa tins were also quite good for this as I recall. Francis Wood, my school friend went the whole hog and put the record into a homemade sleeve (with suitable handwritten text) with inner cover and the disc finally inside. I did play this disc some years ago and it was still intelligible (just) but nowadays I have no 45/78rpm kit to play it on. I remember the first time we made such a disc back in 1962 how amazed I was that it worked.

2 comments:

Dominic Rivron said...

Wonderful. I the 60s my dad and I made a working meccano record player. For a stylus and amp it used a pin stuck through the tip of a paper cone.

It worked! A neighbour gave us The Bubble Car Song and Seven Little Girls Sitting on the Back Seat to play on it.

Never thought of making rather than playing records with it.

Michael, AA1TJ said...

Very nice, Roger! It reminds me of a Japanese toy that appeared a few years ago.

http://blog.makezine.com/2008/11/13/building-the-gakken-cup-p/