I finished a project I've been thinking about for years and have been
actually doing something about for several months.  It's a table for
repairing 88n piano rolls.  It looks like a little wooden coffee table
about 18" (45 cm) long with legs about 5" (12 cm) high.  It's a few cm
wider than a piano roll and has a flat chipboard top with rounded ends.

There is a sheet metal housing screwed to each end of the table.  One
end contains the spring loaded chuck and the drive chuck for a roll.
These were salvaged from a discarded spoolbox found on our local
garbage tip by a friend.  (His find provided the impetus to get this
project going.)

The housing at the other end contains the take-up spool from the same
spoolbox.  Crank handles on the drive chuck shaft and the central shaft
of the take-up spool enable the roll under repair to be moved back and
forth.

So far this sounds like any old repair rig but wait, folks, there's
more!

Often, when repairing a roll, one comes across a section where some
(supply your own adjective here) person has applied sticky tape to the
underside of the paper, or where the paper is so badly folded and torn
that access to the underside is necessary.  This outfit makes that
possible; so far I've only described half of it.

The bearings for the shaft of the take-up spool are two brass disks,
about an inch in diameter and a quarter of an inch thick.  The shaft
fits through holes drilled in the centres of the disks.  Each disk has
a shallow trough turned in the middle of its rim.

The sheet metal housing at the take-up end has two vertical U-shaped
cutouts, into which the brass disks' shallow troughs just fit.  This
means that the take-up spool can be lifted up out of the housing at any
time.  When I want to get at the underside of a roll I clip a second
"coffee table" with shorter legs to the music roll end of the first
table.  This second table has a metal housing with U-shaped slots at
its far end.

All I have to do is lift the take-up spool out of its usual position,
move it up and over in a wide arc and fit it into the second set of
cutouts.  Hey presto!  The roll is now lying underside up on the second
table surface.

Why does the second table have shorter legs than the first?  Because
the paper is now unwinding from the bottom of the roll rather than the
top.

John Phillips

 [ Adapted from John's original article in 961218 MMDigest.
 [ See the photographs at http://mmd.foxtail.com/Pictures/
 [ -- Robbie