Ron, It depends on the age of the stylus bar. The earliest ones have the bare diamonds soldered in, the later ones have a nickel plated diamond soldered in. In either case you can heat and remove the stylus.
According to Edison Diamond Disc Re-Creations records & artists 1910-1929 page 107: In this process the diamonds were first silver plated, then mounted on rods with paraffin, plated for 72 hours with nickel layers electro deposited under tension. The styli were thus held under layers of nickel at thousands of pounds of pressure. The nickel-encased diamonds were then polished to conical shape, the nickel at the stylus point being found away as the diamond was polished. The finished stylus was then soldered into its stylus bar. In the early days, bare diamonds were just soldered into bars and were prone to breakage when carelessly lowered onto the record. Back to me, think of a wooden pencil the diamond is the lead. When the pencil is sharpened the wood is removed and the lead is shaped. Steve > List mates, > > Has anyone on the list removed their own DD styli? Is it just soft solder > and therefore easy to heat up and push out? Does anyone have a trashed > needle bar with the remnants of a stylus that I could experiment with? A > company that is local to me has no trouble making the styli to the > original > specifications but is reluctant to experiment with removing the old stylus > for fear of damaging the needle bar. > > Ron L > > _______________________________________________ > Phono-L mailing list > [email protected] > > Phono-L Archive > http://www.oldcrank.org/pipermail/phono-l/ >
