RWL

Thanks for the clarification. Also, I had missed the fact that you had mentioned you were using an epoxy putty the first time around. I was thinking viscous fluid epoxy. When I need to have epoxy with a little bit of substance, I trim some fuzz off the edge of fiberglass body material fabric and mix that in the epoxy to make it stiffer.

I'll have my son 3D print a pencil/screwdriver holder for me as in the photo below of my Edeophone in its case. Before I had the plastic pencil holder, I used a thin plastic tube that held the screwdriver upright. It was secured to the cloth in the corner with double sided cellphane tape - which didn't hold very well. The case for my Edeophone does have foam backer surrounding the instrument. There's enough room in the new Wheatstone's case that I could still add the foam padding. Making a new case for the Edeophone is on the agenda. The 1/2" plywood I used for that is too heavy. You can see the strap "rings" sticking out on the sides. I'll add those to my Wheatstone case too.

I used green suede as the cloth lining and thin cardboard (about the thickness of cardboard from new shirts) as the backer. I glued the fabric to the cardboard with spray-on contact adhesive and it worked well for this purpose. I used double sided cellophane tape to adhere the lining to the interior of the case. This is not holding as well as I'd like and on one or two panels so I might go back and redo those areas with either double sided carpet tape or glue dots. I covered the corner blocks with the same fabric but used hot melt glue to adhere it to the wood. I used two drywall screws per block to affix the corner blocks. You can see the screw heads on the outside of the case. Aesthetically this is the only part that I don't like, but I didn't know of a better way to do this. In theory I could have glued the blocks to the interior of the case, but it would have broken up the interior lining into multiple small sections, which I wanted to avoid. As you can see from the completed case, I left room to the right of the instrument for incidentals. I typically carry reading glasses and a screwdriver in my case. The space is also large enough to add a hand held recorder. I have a few odds and ends to complete. I haven't bought a handle for it yet and I need to add corner protectors - anybody have a recommendation for corner protectors? I will probably recess the nuts for the hinges and latch into the weather guard. I also like to have a carrying strap for my case - it helps at the NE Squeeze In where the walks from workshop to workshop are on uneven ground and a little longer than the usual walk from the car to a building. I need to make the strap hardware yet.

The material is 1/4" plywood and the tabbed edges were cut for me on a laser cutter by my son at the university. The tabbed edges made a strong glued joint. After gluing it, I sawed off the box top. I added the hinges, twist latch, and weather shield prior to covering the outside of the case in 900 denier nylon fabric. I spray painted the case black in areas where there would be seam joints in the cloth to obscure any gaps that might occur in the cloth seams. I used brush on contact cement on this one. On a previous case I had used spray on contact cement and it didn't hold the fabric as well. After the exterior cloth was on, I reassembled the hardware and weather guard. The pieces of the weather guard needed to be shortened once the cloth was placed, so fitting this previously just made a little more work than necessary. The only reason I made the weather shield was to give the box a little more strength in this area. It is just pieces of 2x4 ripped to about 3/16" thickness and sanded. I did need to give the outer edges a few degrees of bevel so that the lid closed on it without interference. More photos of finishing the interior in the next post.

Dave, a point of clarification. By "wet" do you mean taking a toothpick and smearing the epoxy around the inside of the hole to push it into all the nooks and crannies, or does putting water into the hole do something to make the epoxy extend farther or adhere better (counterintutive to me since I think of epoxy and water being repellent of each other, but really useful to know if water and epoxy work this way). This may be one of those situations where "wet" has a different connotation in the UK and the USA.

Don't forget to put some type of release agent on the screw or you'll permanently glue the screw to the instrument. The usual recommendation in metal working groups is to use Johnson's paste wax as the release agent, but IIRC grease also works. In theory, epoxy being a plastic, if you forget to coat a screw with a release agent, you can heat the metal to the point that the epoxy melts and then back it out. I've read that the usual epoxy begins to melt somewhere over 200ºF. If you used JB Weld (in the US) it melts at around 450º-500º F which is the temperature that wood begins to char.

Send more photos. I want to see the completion of this and how it works.

I don't play every day, but I do play often enough. My fingertips still get a little tender if I've been playing for an hour or two. Not unbearably tender, but I do notice them.

With regard to the green lining. You might try looking at a fabric shop for ultrasuede. It may or may not be a match. Or you could take the case itself to the fabric shop and ask if they have any material that matches. You're unlikely to find the perfect color match, but you may find the right fabric in a shade that's close.

I made a (too) heavy case for my TT Edeophone several years ago. A year or so ago I sewed a shoulder strap for it. The shoulder strap was a big improvement, but I'm planning to replace that case made with 1/2" plywood with one made from 1/4" plywood. When I made it, I allowed extra length so I could put in my hand held recorder, music glasses, and a 3D printed holder for the screwdriver & pencil. A .002" cleaning shim that Greg Jowaisas gave me resides in the bottom of the box sandwiched between cereal box cardboard.

Yay. Thanks Greg. Keep building it. It's fun to go window shopping and also to see what you've been working on.

No Concertina tree this year Greg? We miss it.

Both VLC media player and Pot Player will play wmv files and both are freeware, but I wouldn't install a program just to see one file.

I'm glad to know it's viewable by at least some outside of the US. VLC and Pot Player (what I use) are both good video viewers. Whether it's viewable to Apple users or not I don't know. For those who can't see the video it's a classic story line - Salesman's car breaks down and he goes to a farmhouse for help. Farmer has a pretty daughter. Spends the night at the farmhouse. Salesman and daughter sneak off in the night, knocking a concertina off an upright piano in the process, leading to loud sounds. Father doesn't wake up until he hears the sounds of bottle caps from the beer being popped off.

One of our concertinas falling off a piano isn't funny, but it was a square shaped instrument and I suspect it was an inexpensive ebay prop bought for the occasion. If it had been my Edeophone, I'd be crying.

Here's a funny Budweiser beer commercial with a concertina sighting at 24 seconds. The original was an mp4 file which most viewers could probably open, but it was almost 5 Mb so it couldn't be attached to this thread. The only way I could find to shrink it enough to make it attachable was to convert it to a windows wmv file - and in ntsc format. Some on the other side of the Atlantic might not be able to view this. If there's another workaround to make it more universally viewable let me know. Bud_Commercial_w_concertina_@_24_sec.wmv

In a couple of recent threads, flat vs round topped buttons were mentioned and it prompted me to ask the question - am I the only one whose finger tips get tender from playing my concertina? My main instrument is a 56 key tenor treble Edeophone whose buttons are rounded and relatively small. Admittedly it's possible I'm hammering my buttons, but I wondered if tenderness was common to small round topped buttons.

If you find someone in the Portland area, great. Many of us are self taught and used the Butler tutorial on the English concertina: http://www.concertina.com/butler/butler-the-concertina-tutor.pdf

Welcome Michael. I have little to add other than to point out Dave Elliot's book The Concertina Maintenance Manual 2nd Edition which you may have to source from him because of the ridiculous Amazon price. I have "known" Michael through several years of a luthier's discussion group TOBI (theory of bowed instruments) where he has freely shared information on instrument repair. He is one of the premier restorers and is one of the few who have actually worked on and photographed Stradivarius and other similar age instruments.

Is it a tenor treble or an extended treble? What is your expectation on price?

Ad blockers work.

Enough to see the shape of an Edeophone.

Yes. I added 1/8" to my height calculation to allow for the saw cut.

I checked with my son. They're using an Epilog Fusion 40 (75W laser, 40" x 28" bed area) https://www.epiloglaser.com/company/pr/fusion-40-release.htmand it has a maximum height of 13.25" not 13.5 as I initially said.

I don't know how much power the laser has, but it did do it in one pass if I understood my son correctly. He said it would't be a problem to add a straight line cut to the pieces to create the top at the time it was initially cut. By the same token, he said the device has 13.5" of head room so it could be used to cut through an already glued box to create the top.