Experimenting with new gasket material in the HMV 5B reproducer 

I’m just going to guess by the style of the music that this is going to be one of the later ones up around 1932. I know I have this label elsewhere, it’s turned up from time to time in large lots of records that I’ve bought, nice to know the date range thank you, it’ll give me a better idea of what I’m dealing with when I see that label lying on some flea market table in a stack of Dusty records

White rubber tube gasket that is sold for use as diaphragm gasket material on the Victor, or HMV Exhibition reproducer. I sliced it open and fitted it around the diaphragm. Crude, but in this case effective.

That’s typical of most portables, they just don’t have a lot of room. The arm does swing entirely out of the way to take a record on and off the turntable the earlier portables like the Victor Victrola 50 had a lot of clearance under the arm. The VV 35 had pretty good clearance also by the time you reach the 1930s portables had shrunk to a more manageable size and the arms had shrunk with them.