alex_holden

I joined a few days ago as a result of this thread. BTW, from looking at the web site: has the PICA journal not been published since 2008? Or are more recent editions available to members in some other way?

No longer needed.

Do any of you have a set of worn-out vintage bellows left over after replacing them with a new set? I could do with something to practice repairs on before I start gluing bits of patch leather to my concertina's antique bellows with slightly breezy gussets. Ideally they would be similar construction to mine (late 1800s Lachenal, 6 1/4" hexagonal), not completely rotten or smothered in layers of old patches and glue, and in the UK to keep postage costs down. No longer needed: a kind person on the forum has offered to send me a set.

I have seen extremely similar behaviour in the classic car world. One of them had a genuinely unique vehicle, which made it difficult to put a value on it. The owner claimed to have turned down several implausibly high offers at shows. Every couple of months he'd put it on eBay with a low starting bid, then cancel the auction near the end when it looked like there was a chance it might sell for less than what he believed it to be worth, often throwing about bizarre and unnecessary insults, accusations and even threats in the process. Each time he did this he alienated a few more of the relatively small number of people who were genuinely interested in buying the vehicle. In the end he sold it privately for an undisclosed sum.

I used hot hide glue. No problem removing the residue the next time the valves need replacing.

Melodeons are more popular and accessible than concertinas? Why did nobody tell me that before I chose an EC as my first instrument! ;-) I don't think it was the rarity factor that attracted me to the concertina; it was the combination of the sound, versatility, small size, fixed tuning, and if I'm honest the mechanical complexity appealed to me as an engineer. Among my friends I know an anglo concertina player, a melodeon player, a harpist… and at least a dozen guitar and/or ukelele players.

Thanks Jim, that makes sense. :-)

Apologies for such a newbie question. I'm learning English Concertina as my first musical instrument and trying to gain a better understanding of the accidental buttons and playing in keys other than C major/A minor. On a piano keyboard, many of the white keys have a black key on either side of them - they could be said to have both a flat and a sharp adjacent to them. On the EC keyboard, there is only one accidental adjacent to each natural. Sometimes it is a sharp, sometimes it is a flat. My question is, what is the logic behind whether a particular accidental is flat or sharp? For example, the accidental next to A is A flat. If, for the sake of argument, I wanted to play a tune in the key of B major, I would need an A sharp. I guess the answer is to use the nearest B flat key instead. Or am I missing something?

Try Googling for "flight case hardware", e.g. http://www.proaudiostash.com.au/products/hardware/flightcase-hardware/2441.shtml

Here's the style of chisel I'm planning to forge for flattening the bottom of the cavities (perhaps a couple in different widths): http://www.ashleyilestoolstore.co.uk/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=1_5_79&products_id=1375

I'm not sure how the cheapest of Lachenals were done but as a rule if you have a veneered end you would not try to veneer an edge profile but instead rout a cavity and fit a moulding of some sort. If you look at most veneered furniture you will see this method used. Food for thought. I'm going to make some practice boards first so I can experiment with veneering around the profile. The thin veneer is quite flexible but perhaps not flexible enough.

Impressive that they can do that with a CNC laser now. About a decade ago my brother ran a laser cutting workshop, churning out thousands of widgets every day, mostly from stainless steel or aluminium. A CNC router/mill could easily mill out the cavities too (given a very small diameter bit and an accurate CAD model of the outline), but as I'm doing this as a hobby I would rather do it myself the traditional way. I'll be doing the fretwork with a variable speed electric scroll saw. Incidentally I have a manual Taig micro mill (currently in storage and not easily accessible) that "one day" I intend to convert to CNC.

Thanks, I have just received a beautiful set of original inlays thanks to the generosity of somebody on the forum. I have been practising cutting out the pockets/cavities using a razor-sharp scalpel and carving chisel as Dave suggested (though I need to make some special tiny chisels as I don't currently have any that are narrow enough to get into the fine details).

I was practising this last night and thinking I could do with forging a pair of really tiny skewed spoon chisels for flattening the bottom of the cavity.

Thanks for the tip, that looks ideal and easy to make.

A member of the forum has very kindly offered to send me an original set of the metal inlays, so I'll need to work with whatever thickness they used originally. The veneer is only about 0.5mm even before sanding, so I suspect I will probably have to cut down into the maple board under the veneer to inlay them deep enough to get a flush surface. Nope, that's another problem I've been pondering. Presumably they originally used a moulding plane, unless they had an early form of spindle moulding machine (not sure when they were invented). Veneering around the edge profile looks tricky too.

Thanks Dave, that's useful to know.

Thanks for the detailed response Geoffrey! I've sent you an email.

Yes, perhaps they are all nickel-silver but on some of them the shellac has a yellowish tint.

Thanks Geoff! Looking at the photos again, the decorations look more yellow than the keys but not as yellow as brass, so it has occurred to me that they might have been made from gilding metal (a soft copper-zinc alloy that looks a bit like gold when polished). It's interesting that they may have been cast rather than stamped. I'm thinking of cutting mine from thin sheet with a piercing saw. My new ends will be made of Indian rosewood veneered onto a solid maple core, so it should be possible (though fiddly) to inlay the metal pieces into the veneer. I'll send you a private message about the broken piece.

Does anyone know how Lachenal did the twiddly decorative bits in the corners of their ends? I'm making new ends for a rosewood English treble (#21718, believed to be an Inimitable) and I don't have the original ends to work from. From the photos I have seen they look like they were cut from nickel-silver or perhaps even real silver. Were they simply sawn or stamped from very thin sheet metal and glued straight onto the surface, or were they inlaid? Any idea how the dark lines were made on the surface of the metal? Here are a couple of posts that show instruments with the decorations I'm talking about: http://www.concertina.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=12628 http://www.concertina.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=10794

Hiya! I've been lurking here for a while but this is my first post. I mentioned this topic to a friend of mine who isn't a member of the forum, and she asked me to post this response on her behalf: