Re: Thorens Music Box Project
By Craig Smith
Vince, There is great precedence for your solution. Believe me, there is more than one enthusiast who has knocked together a box so they could listen to a new acquisition. In fact, a few years ago I got a very nice machine in this very manner.
Back in the 1920's there was a 20-3/4" Regina dick box in a convent in New York city. The mechanism had been mounted in the wall for some reason. When the building was going to be torn down, one of the men on the destruction crew rescued it and took it home with him along with a bunch of disks. Lacking a case, he made a four sided box out of 1 x 6 pine, without a bottom. His daughter remembers him inviting friends to the house for drinks and cards on Sunday afternoons and they always pulled out the music box and played it on the kitchen table. She got the box when he died years later.
Then more years went by. When she wanted to move to Florida in the 1980's, she decided to sell it and I was the lucky buyer. So at 85 years young, she went South and, at 85 years old the box came North. It sounded awful without a bottom. I found a nice, oak casket case for it after some years searching and refinished it. But before I got a chance to marry them, Marti found me an upright case which had been turned into a record cabinet. It took a few months to turn it back into a musical box case but now I have a really sweet 20-inch Regina Upright.
Now Vince, if you'd like to run the oak table-top case through the table saw a few times it might just fit your 11" machine!! Regards and good luck.
Craig Smith
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(Message sent Mon 6 Jan 1997, 20:37:31 GMT, from time zone GMT-0800.) |
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