R G

I got Noel Hill's new cd about a week ago. It quickly became my favorite concertina cd (I have a dozen or so other concertina cd's). The tune selections are great. Noel is not only an exceptional musician, he is somewhat of an Irish-trad music historian as evidenced by the notes that he has included with the cd. He could probably write a very ineresting book about Irish trad music. I have heard that he plans to put out his own tune book. I hope that he will include a lot background information with those tunes. In summary, he didn't pinch pennys in putting the cd together. The case, graphics, and notes are nice. The production is wonderful. And the tunes are great. I recommend this cd.

Now for non-grease stains I will try bleach. What better test than to try it on some black-dyed english concertina buttons from a box of parts that I have. Bellow left you will see what the black buttons looked like before bleaching. The two buttons on the right were soaked in a 1:20 bleach/water solution (that's one part bleach for twenty parts water). The soaking was done in a closed top jar for two days. As you can see the results vary from one button to another. I suppose that the original manufacturers dyed their darkest bones and saved the brightest ones for white buttons. I will do a longer time trial to determine how long buttons can stay in a 1:20 solution before they begin to decalcify.

There has been much discussion in a previous thread regarding cleaning of bone buttons. Many ideas were tossed around so I thought that I might try a few and post the results here for everyone to see. The pictures below are before and after removing finger grunge (grease, nicotine, etc) using an industrial strength bath tub cleaner. The button was soaked in the undiluted cleaner for 5 minutes, and then wiped clean. I don't remember the active ingredients on the cleaner-label at the moment, I'll need to look it up and post it later. In the next few days I will post the results from using laundry breach to whiten buttons.