Even if you play a concertina under an umbrella it is going to suck water in. After a very wet Morris Federation day of dance recently, I had"lost" several notes and one sounded continuously. The problem was the leather valves sticking - and then eventually drying out in contorted ways. It has taken me a week to sort out all the problems, which I did partly by very gently re-damping the offending valves and stroking them flat while they dried. Two questions arise...
1. Does anyone have a better way of solving this problem? Next time should I take the instrument apart as soon as possible to do repairs, t=rather than waiting more than a day before I could get it home? Should I try to dry it out faster to protect the reeds, or slower to protect the valves?
2. I hate the number of times I have taken the ends of the concertina off and re-assembled them during this process. Is there a shortcut to reassembly in order to check out whether or not a reed "sounds" ? No only is it time-consuming, but I also worry about what mutiple unscrewing and rescrewing is doing to the threads on the screws.
thanks
Gail