alex_holden

That's very interesting Dave. I've seen a Wheatstone Bass English where at least the bottom few (very large) reed frames appeared to have been sand cast in brass.

If you want to rebind them yourself, you could try C. A. Cornish for pre-skived leather strip: https://www.cacornish.co.uk/

They might be EPNS, which also has a very thin plating of pure silver.

Around 60% copper : 20% nickel : 20% zinc. It's slightly harder than brass but much softer than spring steel. Also known as German silver. The name is because it was originally developed as a cheap substitute for real silver.

I once used PVA to glue grille cloths to the back of a pair of freshly polished nickel silver end plates. The next day they were badly tarnished around the piercings. What I hadn't realised until then is that ordinary PVA gives off acetic acid fumes as it dries.

I laminate my wooden ends. I've seen (and repaired) vintage instruments with solid rosewood ends that were badly cracked and missing pieces.

The Crabb looks lovely, Rod. How do you feel about the raised ends?

My first Crane has 15.5mm column spacing and a 98.6mm curve radius, based on measurements of the client's existing Wheatstone. My second one has 13.5mm column spacing and a 93.1mm curve radius, based on measurements of the client's Crane & Sons (actually made by Lachenal). Both have 10mm row spacing. The first one also has slightly larger than standard buttons. You can see pictures of them both on my website.

I know someone who does something similar with home-made sealing wax to decorate the handles of wooden spoons. I believe she over-fills the engraving with molten wax, then scrapes it flush after it hardens. http://www.chatquilit.com/spoons.html

If you have a local accordion tuner, they should be at home with the sort of reeds that are in a Norman concertina. It's possible to experiment with reed weighting by putting a little blob of Blu-tack on the tip. If you're happy with the result you could then make the change more permanent with solder.

Sounds great, well done Jake and Cohen!

You would need to remake the reed pans because duets have lower reeds (= larger chambers) on the left and higher on the right, whereas Englishes are fairly evenly distributed. You would also need some extra reeds for the overlap region. The number of buttons shown on the diagram implies a fairly large instrument, bigger than an English Treble.

I just tried abcm2ps on MacOS (installed via Macports) and it correctly processes Q: values higher than 127, which suggests an issue with the DOS version included with EasyABC for Windows. Just for kicks, I tried giving it a tempo of 32768, and as expected it printed -32768 in the output (showing that it's storing the number in a signed 16 bit short variable).

Looking at this header file, tempo is defined as a short, which is usually 16 bits, not 8. Perhaps the compiler that was used for the DOS version of abcm2ps is treating short as 8 bits? Or maybe it's an older version that is using char instead of short? The parser function is reading the value into an int, then blindly copying it into a short (not good practice). I would be inclined to just change the type in the header file to an int.

You're on the right track. Whatever program EasyABC is using to render the ABC (abc2ps?) is storing the Q value in an unsigned 8 bit variable, without correctly validating that the number will fit in a variable of that size.