Sunday, October 7, 2012

And Other Times One Man's Trash...

Recently, I wrote about my curbside finds in Webster Groves.  A couple days later, I drove by the same house to see if any additional "treasures" had been thrown out.  I found this Silvertone portable record player and brought it home.




As you can see, the interior was a little rough, but if it worked, I was okay with it.  It was an older model and took steel needles such as those used in my Singerphone.  After plugging it in, I tried turning it on and promptly received a shock from the metal tone arm.  I should mention I was standing barefoot on a concrete floor at the time and I was quickly reminded of the many similar shocks I'd received as a child from our old stereo we kept in our concrete-floored basement. 

A couple seconds and a pair of rubber-soled tennis shoes later, I tried again.  The turntable sprung to life.  Unfortunately, it was rotating counter-clockwise (the wrong direction for those who don't remember). 

My first instinct was to reverse the motor wires.  That didn't work.  I should have realized it was a non-polarized motor as the plus pin were the same width and can be plugged into an outlet in either direction.  I'm sure you've fought with the correct direction for a plug in an outlet before.  On modern plugs, typically one pin is wider than the other forcing you to plug it in in a specific orientation.  This is for polarized components that require the current to flow in one particular direction.  .

I played around with it for a while and finally gave up.  The only thing this record player is good for is playing backward-masked records.  Maybe I'll finally find out if Paul is really dead.

Sometimes one man's trash is another man's trash as well.

2 comments:

  1. this sounds like the setup for a crazy story, where a seemingly mundane object is discovered that doesn't work as expected, and instead is a device for time travel (!) or at the very least altering the user's life somehow.

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  2. Perhaps it's counter-clockwise motion can take back the music of Kenny G, like Superman turning back the world in the 1978 movie. But then again, like Superman, perhaps as the ghostly voice of his father Jor-El advised, "It is forbidden to interfere with human history."

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