Hi Everyone.  This contribution is response to the story about the
upside-down Duo-Art tracker bar described in MMD about two weeks ago.
It's taken me a while to get around to this story and that's partly
because I've been involved in the usual end-of-semester panics here
at the University of Tasmania.

But there's more; and here's a bit of advice:  If you work in a
university, and if the Vice-Chancellor (corresponds to a CEO in a big
corporation) sets up a Forum on Promoting Women in the University,
don't ever, ever, write a facetious letter to the University's in-house
newspaper suggesting that a good way to pursue this aim would be to run
a wet T-shirt competition for all female academics.  Things have
finally quieted down but I'm not the VC's favorite academic at
present.  Fortunately the vast majority of my colleagues thought the
letter was funny or I would have dug a hole and filled it in after me.

Anyway, what about this Recordo?  I have a genuine one little old lady
previous owner Gulbransen Recordo, originally purchased here in Hobart
in about 1930.  I bought it about 20 years ago and rebuilt the player
action almost straight away, and it has worked beautifully ever since.

About three years later a player enthusiast from the Mainland
(Tasmania is that island just south of the larger but less important
part of Australia) visited us for the evening.  Of course the
Gulbransen had an airing but after the first roll he said "Well, it
plays very well, John, but isn't the tracker bar upside down?"

I gaped at him, aghast and mortified.  He was right; I had never
noticed this because these players are very thin on the ground here and
I'd never looked closely at another.  I couldn't understand how I could
have been so stupid and careless during the rebuild.

Several years later Denis Condon, the reproducing piano guru of the
southern hemisphere, visited Hobart and we invited him to dinner.
I decided I couldn't face the shame of Denis seeing my upside-down
tracker bar so, after leaving things until the night before of course,
decided to see if I couldn't quickly turn it up the correct way.
Fortunately for domestic harmony it took only about ten minutes
investigation to discover that the tracker bar can't be corrected
without a lot of drilling and machining.  What I have is an original
factory mistake; it's always been the wrong way up.  My wife says it
must be a special southern hemisphere model !

Luckily the Electora expression system in the player is so fast-acting
that this crazy fault hardly matters, but maybe I'll rectify it as a
retirement project.  The Vice-Chancellor will be glad to learn that
this occurs on December 31st this year.

Regards from John Philips in Hobart, Tasmania.