To all the readers of MMD: I apologize for being silent for so long,
but a serious injury in 1993 slowed me down to a snails pace.  Having
recovered fully (after nearly 8 years recuperating) I am back at it
full time.  No more spasms or pain!

First, I would like to thank my more than 10,000 customers and nearly
$40,000,000 in sales of more than 150 different models and styles in
more than 25 countries for the continued support in the advancement
of this hobby as we produce our 11,000th unit this year.  I would like
to thank Rick Cooley for his help in "fine tuning" my automatic guitar.
His suggestions will be implemented on upcoming production models.
I understand Rick is publishing a critique on my guitar in MMD.  Watch
for it.  I hope for the best and know that Rick will be honest in his
report.

I would like to thank my famous customers who are at times hard to reach
like Peter Jackson (working now on his new movie, King Kong) for his
hospitality in his home last year.  You may see his commentary about
Ragtime on our web site at http://www.ragtimewest.com/  It seems that
a customer, Michael Wolfe's son in Wellington, NZ, worked for Peter in
The Lord of the Rings film, which Peter directed.  I visited Michael
while I was in Wellington.  Thank you Michael for you hospitality and
dinner as well.

I would like especially to thank my newest dealers and museums
featuring Ragtime products.  Danny Purcell is opening a Ragtime store
and showroom in South Australia.  Everything is being built now and
should be shipped by June.  Thank you Danny for your assistance here!
If any readers would like to visit Australia, the store should be open
by the end of the year, there is a lot of decorating to do.

Thank you Peter Schneider for your order of nearly all my models.
I hope your showroom in Holland opens soon.  I would like to visit you
again.  If any readers are visiting Holland contact me and I will ask
Peter if he is available, since the showroom is not open yet.

We also have a new showroom opening this summer in Cape Cod, Mass.
It will feature almost all models.  Four have been shipped there this
month.  Thank you Shay, I look forward to visiting this coming week to
see how the store is coming.  Shay has an arcade museum there and it
will feature our products on display and available for order.

Our calliope/bandorgans are available for viewing (he has 3) in
Allentown, PA.  If you want to see one, give me a call and I will ask
Dennis when he will be available.  Dennis is a Shriner and uses them
for entertaining children of all ages.  Dennis loves to talk about his
band organs.

For those of you near New York City and Las Vegas this summer, watch
for our Bluegrass units appearing in all the FAO Schwarz stores having
grand openings this July.  Also, 8 million catalogs are being printed
in August with our products included!  Thank you David Niglin for your
support!  Especially the Store in Caesar's Palace, The Forum Shops.
They may eventually have several of our instruments in stock.

Thank you CBS and Bob Barker for including us in the Price is Right
Show.  Thank you for buying at least one guitar or nickelodeon per
month and thanks for the publicity, it is well received.  I look
forward to many future orders.

We have shipped more than 1,000 nickelodeon conversion kits.  I have
no way of knowing how well the piano was rebuilt prior to installation.
I hope for the best.  Thanks to all or our Kit installing dealers
especially Dean Streblow in Duluth and John Talbot in San Antonio.
I know John reads MMD.  Dean stocks our products and he just took a
bluegrass unit to a show at the Pheasant Run Resort near Chicago.
The Chicago Land coin show is one of the largest of it's kind.

I would especially like to thank Marvin Yagoda http://www.marvin3m.com/
for his more than 20 years of friendship and his purchasing of nearly
everything I can make.  (Marvin calls and says, do I have everything?).
You an see a huge display of almost all our work at Marvin's Marvelous
Music Museum in Farmington Hills, MI (Detroit).

I would like to thank Disneyland for their many orders.  As for the
Welte, it seems that the employees in the candy store complained
endlessly as it played the same 10 tunes for years.  It caught fire
because a previous technician had installed an under rated power supply
and it and the processor overheated.  I'm not sure which because most
of the charred remains had been removed when I got there.  It seems
that he had installed huge 24-volt solenoids drawing nearly an amp
apiece and expected a single processor made by Devtronics in
Sacramento, without relays to run them and not heat up.  (I recognized
the pin out strip).  They nearly lost the Welte in flames!

After endless phone calls trying to get the "tech" to repair it, they
called me and asked if I would help.  I said that I was too busy and
that it was not in my normal line of work.  I suggested that they keep
trying to get him to honor his work, but evidently that didn't happen.
I really didn't want to do the job, mainly because of the hours.  They
will only allow working Midnight until 7 AM.

After endless persuasion I agreed.  The solenoids were already in
place, so the job was easy.  All I did was take an Octet Designs
Processor, the software was partially designed by myself and the now
deceased Laurent Corey, thank you Ron Perry for continuing the
production of the Mediator Systems processor.  To this processor I
added a 150 amp power supply and enough 10 amp relays to do the job,
wired it accordingly and ran a cord to a normal Ragtime Kiosk for coin
operation and selection of nearly 200 Welte songs.

After finishing the job, the unit, they felt that the unit played too
loud and took it upon themselves to spill the air and lower the volume
to nearly nothing.  There was nothing I could do about this, and the
employees, I understand had actually cut the cord the year before to
stop it!  Well, now it will play nearly 200 songs thanks to Mike Ames
help., Thanks Mike for your songs, they really made a difference.

I would like to thank Freddie Gerer in Germany for his continued
support, going on 20 years now.  I would like to thank Bill Bollman
in his help in the designing of the new BB special.  It will be a
popular model, I am sure.  Watch our web site for it's appearance in
June.  Bill reads MMD too.

Thank you C.H. Kim for ordering and stocking all our products,
including Little Bertha in Seoul, S. Korea.  C.H. maintains a showroom
there, if you are in Korea.  I you find yourself in Ankara, Turkey,
there is a Ragtime MIDI Guitar in the mall next to Best Buys.  I haven't
been there yet, but would love to go there someday.

Thank you Dave Ramey Jr. for your recent order.  I am sure that you
will do your best with it!  Thank you Jess Blaker for 20 years of
friendship and purchasing nearly everything we make.  You may see these
units on display in his antique auto museum in Turlock, California.
Call (209) 634-4931 for an appointment.

You may see some or our products at Ripley's Believe it or Not museums.
There is a MIDI bluegrass unit in Atlantic City and a MIDI Banjo in
Wisconsin Dells.

I you are ever in Buenos Aires, go to the Bingo Alvelleneda.  This is a
Las Vegas style Casino in Argentina.  There you will find a BGJ playing
for free.  They had us build it to run completely on 12 volts for import
purposes.

If you find yourself in Columbia, there is an amusement park on the
east side of Bogota called Piscelago (Fish Lake).  It is a large and
modern water park and the front gate features a Ragtime Castaway Band.
The park is actually a gift to the people and is operated at no profit
so that the regular people can enjoy it.  Out Castaway Band was donated
to the park by a wealthy doctor and is maintained by the park.  It has
been there 4 years now playing all day, everyday.  In addition to a
Castaway Band they have a guitar and bass guitar.

Thanks to Don Strong of Bear Creek in Bryant, IN our largest
orchestrion will be on display there this summer.  Don bought a Ragtime
Band Wagon from me at last year's IAAPA exposition in Orlando, FL and
we delivered it to him after the show.  I understand that it will be
included in a stage show presentation.  I hope to be there when they
begin dress rehearsals.  Give me a call Don.  You can download movies
of it playing from my web site.

Our associates in Argentina are making quality dreams come true!  They
are building our hand carved cabinets there and we are receiving
another container this coming month.  Besides building high quality,
hand made cabinets, they carve them by hand to my specifications.  Only
a handful of these cabinets are available and we sell out fast!  Last
time, before the container arrived.  We are working to correct this.
The next shipment will have twice as many carved cabinets.

A little history of Ragtime Automated Music: Started in 1971 by myself,
Ken Caulkins, in Modesto, California, using wooden pneumatics built in my
basement on a Shopsmith.  Marketing my products at craft fairs, antique
shows and county fairs, I continued to advance.  At first I made 88
note player pianos.  But a chance meeting of John Malone of Play-Rite
Music rolls in Truck, California, introduced me to the Orchestrion.
John provide help and friendship to make the transition to nickelodeons
possible.  Truck is only 3 miles from Ragtime.  Thank you John for
you terrific rolls.

In 1977 a successful ad campaign in the Antique Trader netted more than
50 orders in 2 weeks for nickelodeon conversions.  Struggling to keep
up with the orders, I immediately moved to a large cement warehouse and
hired nearly 50 people to assist.  A customer (Bill Williams of Pacific
Aluminum) suggested I make the pneumatics from aluminum extrusion (he
owned an aluminum extrusion plant) and that he would trade enough
material and the die to make 50 stacks to me if I would build him a
nickelodeon using aluminum pneumatics.  I agreed.  Within a year it was
obvious that the aluminum was too heavy and caused excessive wear to
the cloth.  (although I serviced one in Pasadena 2 months ago that
still worked loud and fine!)

As luck would have it, in 1978 another customer came along and made me
the same offer using plastic.  His name was Don Borden of Hope Plastics
in N.  Hollywood, CA.  Don became a great customer, buying many of our
nickelodeons and giving them to family members.  Don's two sons survive
him and now Steve and Bill run the plant.  So in 1978 Ragtime converted
completely to Plastic.  With a few changes, the plastic pneumatics were
patented and became the well known and adaptable pneumatic we love and
trust today.

I married Valorie in 1986 and that same year Ragtime teamed up with
"The Sharper Image".  Their hundreds of orders allowed us to buy a few
acres of commercial property in the county, near Modesto where we built
the 14,000 square foot factory that houses us now.  Without a mortgage,
Ragtime flourished.  In 1989 Valorie gave birth to our daughter Jamie
and a contented customer was retiring due to illness.  He called me and
said that I could have all the injection molding machines and machinery
in his shop if I could get it out the next week.  All he asked was for
a contract to be drawn up for $1 to protect me from his heirs, just in
case because he was going into the hospital with serious heart trouble
and didn't expect to come out alive.  I accepted and the following
Monday we cleared out the second building that housed my 35 antique
automobiles.

Sending a crane to get the machines, we had them in the building
within 2 days and I sold the cars at a time that proved later to be
one of the highest values the cars would bring, right before a slump in
antique car prices.  Later that year I hired a tool and die maker to
begin the 12 years of mold making that was necessary to produce Ragtime
products in any quantity and at a price that was not an embarrassment
to ask for.

Many people have asked how we can build such a fine product at such
a low price (Rick Cooley was one of the latest).  Well, through
automation, like everything else these days.  Not by cutting corners.
So with plastic pneumatics in hand, in 1991 our son Jeff was born and
we set out to build a Robotic assembly station simply to build
pneumatics.  To this day, this machine, working one day a week, has
produced nearly 1,000,000 pneumatics!  And every one is exactly alike!

In 1993 I slipped and fell backwards into an empty swimming pool (the
deep end).  I landed on my neck and shoulders.  Having martial arts
training, I was trained to tuck my head in a fall to protect it.
I didn't hit my head, but the muscles and tendons in my neck were
crushed.  I couldn't hold my head up for some time without a brace and
years without intense pain and muscle spasms.  Needless to say, my
salesmanship went out the window.  No longer capable of standing at
trade shows, I took a few years off.  My sales to the Sharper Image
were still strong and my good reputation sustained me for years.  My
orders decreased steadily year by year until we were getting less than
$1,000,000 a year in orders.  My expenses were close to that so I went
a few years at breakeven.  I had savings, but that was eventually
depleted.

Then I got a call from the Disneyland Arcade, around 1995-96 or so.
They were going to MIDIfy the Welte!  At that time, we only made MIDI
pipe valves for our calliopes.  They asked if I could supply a valve
for the Welte.  I said that I might, give me a while to think about it.
I called them back later after proving an idea for a small MIDI valve
but they had decided to hire a man from Southern California to do it.
So I went forward with the new valve, patented it, and that became the
M125 MIDI valve that attaches to any Ragtime plastic pneumatic.  Thank
you Ken Knibb for the inspiration that led to the Ragtime Automated
Guitar, Banjo, Ukulele and all that we represent today!!

Well, as it would be, they eventually had to call me to come and do the
job after it nearly caught fire.  The job was done in 7 hours and still
works fine today.  (although too quiet for my taste).  There have been
no service calls required in nearly 2 years, although I went in one
time and raised the volume, they quickly reduced it again.

The inspiration to build the guitar actually came from my then 5 year
old son, Jeff in 1996.  It seems that Jeff had Juvenile Diabetes and we
did not know it yet.  Because of this, Jeff was getting up frequently
at night to use the bathroom.  Often times, he wouldn't go back to
sleep.  One night, I heard him rustling papers in the hallway at 3 AM.
I went out to discipline him only to find numerous drawings of
automated instruments.  Jeff looked up and said to me "Dad!  We can use
the computer to automate stringed instruments!" Jeff had been up all
night drawing his conceptions.  Jeff was already familiar with the
computer and had been downloading MIDI files regularly.  This led me to
start considering the automated guitar.  The following Feb 5th, 1997,
on his birthday, following eating too much cake and ice cream with root
beer, he was taken to the emergency room in a near coma and diagnosed
with juvenile diabetes.  Thank you Jeff for the concept!  His name
appears on the patent!  Jeff is doing fine now and still enjoys the
computer.

Now, to take a step backwards: My neck injury led me to explore
computers, the internet and MIDI song arranging.  The irony is that
I may not have developed the automated guitar without 3 people being
injured!  Thanks Heart (the plastic company we now own), Jeff and
myself.  We are all alive and well incidentally.  And without my
injury, I would most certainly not have spent nearly 4 years at the
synthesizer arranging guitar music.  I gained 40 lbs. and got out of
shape.  (I'm back in shape now).  It seems that all my big advances
have come from the help of family, friends and good customers.  This
is the second year in a row that we have shown a profit since my injury
and the more than $1,500,000 investment in automating stringed
instruments.

In March of 2004 our daughter Natalie was born and we closed the mold
making shop (we hadn't needed a new mold in over a year) so my mold
maker found a mold makers job locally.  Tom still works here part time
doing maintenance of the molds, but my shop foreman, Glenn Kern is
operating the injection molding machines now.  Thanks to all and all
not mentioned here, you have all played a great part in the
continuation of a fine hobby and business, automated music.

Ragtime products are being shipped this spring to Power Park in Finland,
Fancy World Park in Taiwan and Wannado Park in Florida.  Let me know if
you need more information.  You can see our products in Euro Disney,
Bush Gardens, Marine World, Branson, MO.  Many of the new location are
not open to the public yet, so check with me if you want to visit them.

If you are wondering how our products hold up playing 24 hours a day
in Casinos, it is simple.  We train their technicians to do the
maintenance.  We provide digital movies on the computer screen of
maintenance procedures to back up the training.  Our products require
far, far less maintenance than slot machines so they are very happy.
You may see a Bluegrass Unit at Terrible's Casino in Searchlight,
Nevada.  It plays 24 hours a day and has been there for 2 years now.
It plays for free.  The only wearing part is the plucker wheels and
they simply snap on and must be replaced every 4 million plucks.

As for the future, we are currently constructing a MIDI to roll
perforating machine, utilizing Galvo laser technology.  It will cut on
the fly and tempo compensate automatically.  The biggest plus will be
that custom rolls will be possible instantly as well as custom
selections on O rolls.  It will be setup for everything from 88 note
to Violano.  The original purpose is for Ragtime rolls.  Rolls for our
Roll Guitar, Roll Banjo and eventually Roll operated Sax and Bluegrass
units.  It should be on line this June.  Dave Ramey is first in line
for custom rolls for his units.  Give me your requests.

We've been producing units for 33 years now, many units are more than
30 years old.  Many have played in Pizza parlors and Ice Cream Parlors
for years.  Many now need rebuilding.  We improved our design and the
new design is not compatible with models older than 1985.  We do,
however, offer complete replacement stacks for Ragtime Nickelodeons and
88 note players as well.  The plastic pneumatics before then had a
brass elbow and were 1/2" shorter.  I lengthened the pneumatic in 1985
to allow more power and greater volume control.

All units are guaranteed for 1 year in the home and 90 days commercially.
No one has ever been turned down for warranty and I still offer a liberal
exchange policy.  In most cases original customers can upgrade by paying
the difference in price plus transportation.  That is why I have used
instruments for sale on eBay from time to time.  We take our own
products, no matter how old, from the original purchaser back in trade
on a newer, larger, or better unit.

Yes, some pianos are in poor condition, either from wear over the
years, or improper rebuilding of the piano by the installer of the kit.
We do not qualify our kit customers, and I have no desire to.  We offer
complete restoration of pianos here, but do not require it.  I am a
believer in freedom.  We make good solid conversion kits and guarantee
that they will last.  And I will sell one to anyone who desires to
install one.

If your traveling down route 90, stop at Wall's Drugs in Wall, SD, where
you can see a Bluegrass Special.  They give away free ice water!  They
have ordered more, to be built as soon as we get the next PO from them.

I usually keep most of our units in stock at our Ceres, California,
location.  Please call first, I would love to meet you and show you our
plant.

Ken Caulkins
dba Ragtime Automated Music machines
http://www.ragtimewest.com/