Bumping this back to the top as I finally took a road trip this past weekend courtesy of my friend Keith who has a mini-van and was extremely generous to help me drive up to Windsor Ontario and back to Brooklyn to pick up the Fairchild 523 lathe I had purchased on ebay.
It turns out that the previous owner was Richie Hawtin! (famous among ravers and electronic dance music enthusiasts for his 90's minimalist techno - and more recently for his productions as "Plastikman" - and in fact featured on the cover of this months' EM) - who was using it to cut dub plates for his own DJ sets. Richard has been living in Berlin and touring most of the time - so he stopped using this lathe to make dubplates about 6 years ago, and just had it in storage at his Dad's place in Windsor. His Dad wanted the work shop space back (Richie keeps collecting 80's era arcade games that take up space as well - saw a vintage Pac Man there) and Richie initially told him to "just scrap it." Luckily for me his Dad bothered with putting it up for auction instead!
The drive back home was slightly adventurous in that we got hit with a snow storm in Ohio & Michigan - but luckily my friend grew up in Syracuse NY so was used to driving in this stuff. We made stops in Cleveland the way there and in Clarion PA on the way back - with whiskey and pub& diner food to warm us up at these pit stops. Unfortunately because of the weather we decided to let discretion rule over tourism so didn't get to make a planned stop at the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame - but guess I can do this next time I'm ever up there.
The movers got it up the 2 flights of stairs (the building my studio is in was built circa 1900 and has no elevator) without incident except for a scratch on one of the wooden cases sides (not really a big deal as I figure I'm going to eventually repaint it back to something like the original black anyway).
Plugged it in and did a few basic tests yesterday. All 3 speeds of the turntable motor are working, motor is reasonably quiet, pitch control and carriage control is working, even the lamps on the microscope and controls are all good.
Turns out this lathe is truly continuously variable pitch (instead of discrete steps that I worried it would be) - so theoretically it could be converted to automatic pitch (although probably really difficult to do - we'll see).
It came with the chip jar and all the hoses to hook this up and for the platter lock down to the vacuum as well - and doing a quick test this with just my regular vacuum cleaner all the connections seemed to work ok. So just need to get a decent vacuum for this (any suggestions on one - especially one that runs relatively quiet - is appreciated!).
This thing has awesome torque too - it kicks in to full speed after about a second - no need to give it a push like you do on the older Neumann's - and you can push your hand hard against it and didn't seem to slow down.
Next up is that I need to add a tonearm and do some tests for wow, flutter, speed accuracy and rumble. Right now the best bang for buck solution I think I've found are the new Rek-O-Kut Transcribe arms for just under $600 -
http://www.esotericsound.com/ArmsAndHeadshells.htm (although for $150 more I can get their S-260 MK II arm which includes fluid damping - which should make it able to play more difficult passages as well as minimize high freq resonances more - but don't know whether this is actually desirable on a tone arm which I will likely be checking cuts on more than using for archival transcriptions).
After that the to do list is: an isolation platform, vacuum, stereo cutter head, suspension/mount for cutter head (most likely will need to get custom machined), stereo front end (RIAA encoder/feedback controller/meters) or dedicated cutting amps. If this is of interest to folks here I'll post my progress on this as it happens.
Best regards,
Steve Berson