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Record Cutting Lathes


Tenshun

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Guest petesasqwax

 

Awesome, will that be PDF so that you can share ?

If it is i will set up a VRX archive or such, so everything can be saved on the page for other users too

 

I'll definitely share it, no matter what form it's in. I suspect it'll be in electronic form, and is coming from Toshi himself.

 

I knew this was going to be the case!

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So the deck spins, it looks like the speed control works and looks like the pitch control works, fuck knows what that thing on the back is, turn it on and the LED flashes but it seems to do fuck all (Yeah i will read the manual haha) when i turn up the input dial there is a ton of noise from the cutter head, this is fucking worrying (No input connected) the heater current gauge is completely gone, think i will have to source a new one of those, there is no cutting stylus at all, and the wires from the heater core plugs are not even there, so need to read up about those and how to replace them, however my biggest worry was the cutting arm not working, and that fucker worked, no way to check the speed of it yet, and it sounds wee bit grindy (Suspect the thread needs a bit of grease)

But considering how much i spend on trinkets and bits for the archive, I always feel buyers remorse for at least a minute or so after i receive a delivery, this thing, nothing, still in awe now, and even if it didn't work i would keep it as the most extreme turntable ever made hahahahaha, its obviously broke in all the places i have mentioned, and missing the centre weight too, but i fucking love it.

 

Paid a £1000 plus £35 delivery (Came on a fucking pallet hahaha) Pete, how i got it that cheap i do not know, mine was the first and last bid, all i can assume is that it was the right place right time (everybody is skint as arseholes in January) I decided last year i was buying a lathe, and the only realistic prices was Souris Vinyl Recorder (£5000), but on some back and forth with him in emails, all the stories about him are true, he is an ignorant arrogant piece of shit racist, he wont sell to anybody in Asia or former eastern block (Not effecting me, im UK, but still) and got funny with me because i mentioned the lathe trolls forum, and said he would not sell to me, to which i completely lost the plot and tore fuck in to him and told him exactly what i thought of all his shit, he has emailed me several times since to make sure that i am still interested and hoping that he can do business with me, a very strange fucking idiot, so when this popped up and i had actually saved a grand towards the vinyl recorder, i thought fuck it.

A complete one is on US ebay for 8k and i think Gizmo wanted 3 for his not working, they are not cheap bits of kit, and lets be fair, it is the ultimate PDX 2000 mod, whichever way you look at it haha.

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I hope you guys can get thoae vestax working!

I have never heard a record cut on one before or let alone seen one in action!

Truth be told, if you read somewhere like lathe trolls, there are countless people telling you how utter shit the VRX is, but these are people who are wanting to cut metals for pressing, cuts on the VRX should be well within purpose for DJing with, and i have come across all these sorts of monkeys before, Gearslutz is a perfect example, they will tell you that you need 30k of valve bullshit, and get shocked when some top engineer says he only uses software.

I suspect getting the right mastering worked out for this deck will get a good cut, and lets not forget that some of the early Trax records, were repressed on vinyl repurposed from the charity shops, and they still rocked the clubs inside out !!

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Guest petesasqwax

Damn, that's fucking insane! I agree, a grand is a total steal for that and even if it costs you the same again to get it working (which I can't imagine being the case) it's still a chunk cheaper than Souri's machine.

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I dropped a cheeky £250 on them. No real surprise that they didn't even respond.

 

Getting noise from the cutting head might actually be a plus. I get no noise at all. Try playing some audio into it and see if you can hear that.

Toshi has confirmed that I'm missing a rather important part, and is suggesting that I add an RCA input and use an external source to feed the cutter directly. Early days, but I'm confident of getting it running.

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Guest Symatic

Thank you everyone for all the info on making a "skipless" scratch record. I had some success cutting one on plastc!

It tracks pretty well for my first try at making one.

 

Here is a short clip of the plate getting abused:

 

 

 

Gonna keep experimenting!

 

DOPE

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Thank you everyone for all the info on making a "skipless" scratch record. I had some success cutting one on plastc!

It tracks pretty well for my first try at making one.

Here is a short clip of the plate getting abused:

https://youtu.be/tPfKhMWw5C8

Gonna keep experimenting!

 

DOPE

After making that record. I decided to cut some more samples and noticed the sounds were not lining up.

 

I think my record lathe might be turning at a different speed then 33.3 rpm maybe at 33.8 or 34? I have a tacometer to check the speed but it might not be accurate.

 

Does anyone have a work around to making the sounds line up?

 

I was looking at the grooves of other "skipless" scratch records and i can see the sounds are lined up.

 

When i look at mine they sort of go in a spiral.

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Guest Symatic

 

Does anyone have a work around to making the sounds line up?

 

the formula is BPR X RPM.

 

choose an amount of beats you want per rotation. lets make it easy and say 4. so you want 4 BPR.

figure out your RPM of your lathe. lets say its 33.8 (but check first!) so you have 33.8RPM.

 

4 X 33.8 = 135.2.

 

so your project you make the sentence in should be 135.2bpm.

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Damn, that's fucking insane! I agree, a grand is a total steal for that and even if it costs you the same again to get it working (which I can't imagine being the case) it's still a chunk cheaper than Souri's machine.

 

Gonna cost £160 just to get a stylus hahaha, I'm going to ask on Lathe trolls and see if anybody has an old damaged one (Unlikely) i can grab cheap just to check everything else , don't really want to destroy a brand new diamond testing everything.

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Does anyone have a work around to making the sounds line up?

 

the formula is BPR X RPM.

 

choose an amount of beats you want per rotation. lets make it easy and say 4. so you want 4 BPR.

figure out your RPM of your lathe. lets say its 33.8 (but check first!) so you have 33.8RPM.

 

4 X 33.8 = 135.2.

 

so your project you make the sentence in should be 135.2bpm.

Goodlooking out Symatic! I will give it a try and see i that fixes it.

 

 

Flexinoodle, what kind of shank fits on the vestax head? If its a long shank sort of like the Presto and Fairchild heads you could experiment with some cheaper ones from ebay.

 

There is a seller from russia that sells long shank for $7 each

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  • 4 weeks later...
Guest Symatic

So here is my second test at cutting a scratch record. I had to adjust the bpm on audacity to 130.8 i might have to do a bit more adjusting on the bpms. but the record seems to handle some heavy cuts!

 

yeeeeahhhhhh booiiiiiiiii

 

GOOD!

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"and lets not forget that some of the early Trax records, were repressed on vinyl repurposed from the charity shops, and they still rocked the clubs inside out !!"

 


All records have some regrind in them, we use about 2% which isn't much at all, but some places use much more. I bet even some of those 100% virgin PVC discs/editions even have it in...
From a technical point of view, a reground PVC containing record will be better than a 100% virgin PVC record.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I've now proved that audio (albeit quietly) comes through the cutting head with my iPhone and a hacked RCA cable. Now to find a suitable way to push audio properly through it to actually cut a record with audio. Small steps.

 

That is good news! To properly amplify the signal to the head use any audio amplifier with the wire speaker outputs.

Make sure to wire a 1 amp fast blow fuse inline the amp and cutting head. Thats there for protection just incase you send a signal thats too hot into the head. It will blow the fuse before burning out the head.

 

Good luck! And post some audio samples when you got it running

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  • 1 month later...

An update — using standard connectors, I've non-destructively added a pair of RCAs, and have been able to cut some audio. It sounds awful, but I have at least proved that the head can be addressed externally and will cut.

 

 

Now it's a matter of hooking up an amp to get decent volume, and looking into limiters, RIAA etc. But I'm happy to have got this far.

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  • 6 months later...

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