Imagine this scenario: You’ve been following along with my vinyl journey for the past few years, from uninterested commentator to curious outsider looking in to recent convert to burgeoning enthusiast, and you happen to have a time machine. You decide to take a trip back and visit a previous Dennis, tell him that one day soon he’ll actually have a modest but precious record collection, and ask him, “When all is said and done, even after you develop a love for vinyl, what will your least favorite aspect of the hobby be?”
I promise you that unsuspecting past-life me won’t even come close to the correct answer. For all that I find myself annoyed by pops and clicks, as much as I loathe paper inner sleeves, the thing I hate most about vinyl is the stupid dustcovers. I hate them. I hate them to the core of my being, and the slab of acrylic perched atop my U-Turn Theory turntable is literally the only thing I don’t love about it. Why? Just look at the thing.
Careful as I am to baby this hunk of polymethyl methacrylate—to dust it regularly with a soft Swiffer duster, but not before blowing it off with a puff of air—it still looks like the cocaine table at Studio 54 after just a few months of use. I’m not sure if the dust in my house is simply made of diamond, but try as I might, and even with an air purifier perched mere meters away, I simply cannot keep this dustcover from becoming a marred mess after just a season. Thankfully, the fine folks on Reddit had the perfect solution: a golf cart maintenance kit with two buffing pads, two scratch-removal compounds, one wool polishing pad, and a polishing formula, all for right around $30 (all prices in USD). Just add a cordless drill and you’ve got the makings of a dustcover restoration system that’ll probably be good for at least six uses before liquid refills are required.
I recently pulled my dustcover off and gave it a polish for the third time since acquiring my U-Turn last year, and unfortunately, the battery in my cordless drill died about halfway through step two—the fine scratch removal—and at some point in the past few months, my charger developed a short. So as you can see in the image below, I didn’t quite achieve the crystal-clear results I’d hoped for, and I won’t be able to until I can charge my drill’s battery. But thankfully, even getting rid of the heaviest scratches made my dustcover much less of an eyesore, and you can really only see the haze that results from the remaining fine scratches in a raking light from one very specific angle, so I’m not that worried about it.
I’ve also been toying around with the idea of making a doily for the top of my dustcover (a dustcover for my dustcover, if you can believe such a thing), as soon as I’m done knitting my wife’s anniversary gift. I recently picked up some really wild-looking rainbow-dyed yarn during JoAnn Fabric and Crafts’ going-out-of-business sale that would be perfect for the sort of weirdly anachronistic hippie vibe I’ve got going on in my two-channel room.
More than anything, though, what that line of thinking indicates is that vinyl has become a DIY/arts-and-crafts kind of hobby for me in a way I never would have anticipated. Mind you, I should have, especially given that one of my mentors in the world of records and turntables—SoundStage! Xperience’s Joseph Taylor—recommended right out of the gate that I build my own isolation platform. But as with most things, I’m finding it necessary to do things my own stubborn way and tackle my own unique problems with my crafting skills.
The biggest problem, one that’s been plaguing me for months, is that I’m just too damned tall. Stick with me. That’ll make sense in a few paragraphs.
I recently read a statistic that claimed 11 out of 10 new vinyl enthusiasts pick the IKEA Kallax as their storage solution of choice. Guilty as charged, I reckon. And given that my record collection is meager and unlikely to expand much anytime soon, I opted for the basic one-cube-high / four-cubes-tall Kallax. The top two cubes are more than enough to hold my records, the next one down houses some music-related books, and the bottom cube is a drawer containing miscellaneous cords and cables and cleaning supplies.
The only problem with the Kallax, as most people eventually discover, is that it doesn’t have a back. And given that baseboards are things that exist, it’s impossible to push the shelves all the way against the wall. Which means that the rear-ends of your records end up flapping in the breeze, making it nearly impossible to keep your collection neatly lined up.
This is not merely an aesthetic concern. Records that get pushed farther back are harder to see and harder to retrieve, and when you’re putting them back on the shelf, it’s difficult not to push all of the surrounding records back, too.
Some months back, I ordered a couple of record backspacers from a company called Turntable Revival, and they worked like a charm. They’re simple, mind you—a bit of wood sized to fit the standard width of a Kallax cube perfectly, with some double-sided tape to keep them in place. As long as you don’t ham-fistedly shove your records into the shelves like an oaf, they do the job. What more could you ask for?
Well, as it turns out, the 1x4 Kallax just doesn’t work for my Wookiee stature. Bending over to peruse the second half of my little collection housed on the second shelf was becoming a literal pain in the neck (and back). So I added another single cube in the same color, expanding my shelving by one cube, which ended up putting my bottom row of records at a more workable 43″ off the floor instead of the myalgia-inducing 29″ height where they were before. And my intention was to order another Turntable Revival backspacer for that newly minted top shelf.
But given that it took nearly six months for the first shipment to arrive, and the pieces are still backordered to this day, I decided to take matters into my own hands—not with wood, but with a bit of high-density, 3/16″-thick foam-core board ($16 for ten sheets) and some double-sided 3M foam tape ($6 for 60 pieces).
With the foam cut to the required length and width, I think I figured out that these supplies would be enough to create 50 backspacers, if I ever need that many, although I honestly think the one extra will serve me well for at least a year or so, given that I now have one extra empty shelf I can fill.
You can see here that it’s a perfectly elegant solution, giving the records something to push back against, hence lining up evenly and neatly. And while this was originally intended as a stopgap to make up for the fact that I wouldn’t be able to get another proper wood spacer anytime soon, I actually like the foam better. It’s a softer bumper, it’s closer to the color of my actual shelves, and if, for whatever reason, I decide 3/16″ isn’t thick enough, I can easily stack a few extra layers of foam.
And given that my records are all lined up neatly from behind, it stands to reason that they’re lined up neatly from the front, meaning that individual records don’t get buried or pushed back, all my spines are more readable in the gloomy light of my home (seriously, y’all, I thrive in darkness), and re-shelving records doesn’t stress me the eff out anymore.
It’s a funny old thing, isn’t it, how this specific sub-slice of the hobby seems to bring out the DIYer in people. I’ve always thought of audio DIY as either speaker construction on the one hand, or speaker installation and acoustical treatments without the assistance of a professional on the other. But there’s something about vinyl that seems to inspire people to cook up innovative solutions to either very personal problems or problems that plague literally all of us, but with roots in simple material sciences.
What I’m interested in hearing, though, are your own unique DIY / arts-and-crafts solutions to your own problems. Are you using conduit insulation or hollow pool noodles to line up your record sleeves from the back, as I see some people doing? Have you engineered your own LED contraption to illuminate your acrylic turntable platter from underneath? Did you steal Joe’s idea for a build-it-yourself isolation platform? Inspire me with your own handiwork!
. . . Dennis Burger
dennisb@soundstagenetwork.com
