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Richard Mellish

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Everything posted by Richard Mellish

  1. I assume I assume you mean you won't be able to afford an actual Jeffries. New concertinas of traditional construction aren't all that much cheaper, so you may be looking at hybrids. As Jake says, current makers do offer Jeffries layout. However there doesn't seem much to choose between Jeffries and Wheatstone layouts unless you've already become familiar with one or the other, and even then some players seem to switch between them without too much trouble. A bigger difference is between 30-key and 39 (Jeffries) or 40 (Wheatstone), where all those extra buttons allow a lot more flexibility, at a higher price.
  2. As the reed moves into and out of the slot, the flow of air past it changes irregularly rather than in a smooth sinusoid: see Figure 2 of the paper linked to by Kathryn. However I don't understand why the acoustic waveform shown in that figure has a much higher harmonic content than the flow waveform. I do wonder how accurate that flow waveform is: one might expect the flow to start and stop more suddenly as the reed occludes or eases to occlude the slot.
  3. When I first saw the title of this thread I surmised that it had been started by someone in Australia, to discuss concertinas in a sorry state.
  4. Did it start life as an Anglo or is it a converted Jeffries Duet?
  5. I agree that the original reeds would have been good ones. My concerns are that many of those now present can hardly be original, and that even if some are original they are not at their original pitches. I put the ends back on before I thought to photograph the insides of the reed pans but I will take one or two. Edit: picture now attached. Note many reeds much shorter than their slots and shiny at both ends from retuning.
  6. This concertina arrived a few days ago. I can now report that it has been more drastically "got-at" even than was apparent from the pictures. One modification that should have been apparent from the seller's pictures was that the handles had been moved away from the buttons. That isn't too critical. One surprise was that the screws holding the ends on are not the expected kind, threaded only near their ends, but standard 6BA screws. Did Lachenal use those? If not, it suggests that whoever worked on this concertina must have been UK based, even though it was most recently in the USA. Anyway there is a much more serious issue. Besides about a third of the notes not being what would be expected on a Wheatstone-layout G-D, hardly any of them correspond to the notes stamped on the reed frames (where those are legible). Someone has retuned the reeds by drastic amounts. It was already apparent from the pictures that some of the reeds are too long or too short for their slots. Now that I have access to the inner sides of the reed pans it is apparent that some of the push reeds are very much shorter than their slots, so they cannot be those originally present. Perhaps whoever worked on this concertina decided that the original reeds were too rusty or otherwise damaged to be retained, but then replaced them by whatever they could scavenge from elsewhere without bothering about the correct pitches. I am dubious whether reeds that have been tuned far away from their original pitches deserve to be kept, even where their present pitches are correct for a Wheatstone-layout G-D. Anyway further retuning of those that are neither at their original pitches nor at the correct pitches would seem a step too far. I am therefore looking at replacement of many reeds, possibly all of them.
  7. That is certainly a possibility, and it's how I started (in my early 20s, not as a child). On the other hand, as with an adult beginner, a better quality instrument can be re-sold without much loss of value if they don't get on with it.
  8. Many factors influence the weight of a concertina. The most significant must be simply the number of reeds; not only the weight of all their frames but also the overall size of instrument needed to accommodate them. I think the next most significant is whether the reed frames are of brass or aluminium, then the material of the buttons. (From the picture it looks as if Paul's Connor has aluminium frames but brass clamps.) "Raised" ends may allow the edges of the ends to be slightly closer to the bellows and thus reduce the total weight slightly, but I can't believe that makes much difference. That seems to leave only aesthetics as a reason for the extra complication in manufacture. Some people may find raised ends aesthetically preferable and others have no preference. I have just looked at all my concertinas: until I looked I could not have said which have raised ends. (It's a third of them.)
  9. Alex asked whether the raised area on my Wheatstone (Dickinson) Anglo is circular. Yes, it is.
  10. The distances to the centres of the corresponding buttons on my concertinas are 43 mm to 49 mm and 49 mm to 54 mm. These are all 40-button Anglos but I would not expect that to make any difference to those distances. I don't know about other modern lower-end concertinas but those distances on your Wren do seem very small.
  11. I'm not sure which term (domed or plateau) would apply to my Wheatstone (Dickinson) Anglo. The ends are raised over a large area including under the handle.
  12. In general, certainly, but this one could have been a very deliberate exception.
  13. Listed on eBay again https://www.ebay.com/itm/325259378720 If this is the same person still trying to sell it, maybe someone should offer a more realistic price.
  14. For the record: I am buying this concertina. Kevin offered a price reduction. As he has to pay the Reverb commission I have paid the 2% for the forum.
  15. Meanwhile has anyone actually done the experiment to investigate Steve S's original enquiry?
  16. When I need to refit a button (either replacing one that has broken or just because I have disturbed one while doing something else) I often have difficulty getting the lever through the bushing without pushing the bushing out of the hole. At least once I have used a short piece of silicone sleeving. Like the valve rubber it does the job and it has the advantage of not perishing with age.
  17. Misunderstanding! I am perfectly familiar with that. As I said " I would normally understand the word "strobe" to refer to a light that flashes at a controllable rate for viewing a rotating or vibrating object". What I had not encountered before was using a strobe light to measure the frequency of a musical note.
  18. Thank you for explaining that the Peterson devices do actually use a strobe light. That isn't the most obvious way of measuring frequency but fair enough if they choose to do it that way. I didn't use an online calculator. I used a spreadsheet. 1 semitone = 2^(1/12). 1 cent = 1 semitone ^(1/100). 0.1 cent = 1 cent ^(1/10). That differs from unity by about 58 ppm.
  19. This discussion is getting a little heated, but let's look at some numbers. ttonon quotes Peterson strobe tuners as being accurate to within 0.1 cent. By my calculation that is about 58 ppm. The equivalent error in a clock or watch would be about 5 seconds per day. Those figures would be impractical to achieve with an R-C oscillator, but are reasonable with a crystal oscillator even without needing to put the crystal in an oven. A concertina reed can change its pitch considerably more than that with change of bellows pressure, never mind what happens with change of temperature. BTW (thread drift alert) I would normally understand the word "strobe" to refer to a light that flashes at a controllable rate for viewing a rotating or vibrating object, so I am intrigued as to why Peterson chose it for their tuners.
  20. Both the pitch of a reed and the clock frequency in a smart phone (or whatever device) can drift over time. However the specific effect of temperature could be investigated fairly easily. Note the pitch, as indicated by a tuning app, with both the concertina and the phone at room temperature. Then put one of them somewhere warm (such as an airing cupboard) or cold (outside in winter) for half an hour while keeping the other at room temperature. Note the pitch as now indicated by the tuning app. Then swap them over, wait another half hour, and note the pitch again. Throughout, run as few other apps as possible on the phone to minimise internal warming.
  21. I have decided to give this concertina a home. I will aim to report further once it has arrived and I have made further investigations of the reed swaps.
  22. In my teens I dabbled with various instruments. When I was about 23 and living in a university hall of residence, I was rummaging in a store room and (just like Luke) came across a "very cheap 20-button GDR-produced thing". One of the intruments I had dabbled with was a mouth organ, so the suck/blow business made sense, and I was quickly able to get a rudimentary tune out of it. I made enquiries and found that one of the other chaps on that floor had bought it for £2, hadn't got on with it, and was happy to let me have it for the same price. My second concertina (a 30-key Lachenal) cost me nothing at all, as it was in a sorry state and the fellow member of the university folk club who owned it gave it to me for free. My subsequent concertinas have cost me (let's say) rather more than that.
  23. Thanks for the confirmation about the mounting of the inboard (good word!) reeds. The positions of the buttons are exactly as on a normal Wheatstone 40-key box, so there's no doubt that it started life thus. But the note charts worked out by the seller show that many notes are different. I haven't actually counted how many there are of each note, but it appears that at least some of the changes, possibly all of them, were achieved by moving reeds from their normal positions to new positions, where some of them don't fit, as seen in the picture that I posted in this thread. Without pictures showing the action I can't tell which reed positions should be which, and the markings of the original pitches (which may or may not have been changed) are hard to read. I suppose what I am looking for in this thread is any words of wisdom as to how much work (at how much cost) might be needed to bring this concertina back into top condition and just how good it can become. None of the pictures show the action, but the valves look fairly new and the pads may also be new. So it may not need much more than moving all the reeds back to their correct positions, re-tuning, and sorting out odd bits of damage to the chamois(?) seals.
  24. I am very much in two minds whether to buy the 40 key G-D Lachenal that is currently on offer in the Buy & Sell section and would welcome any sage advice from the forum. If someone on the American side of the Pond feels inclined to give this concertina a home I won't mind, but if there are no takers I am half inclined to add it to my collection. Potentially it could be a very good one, but it seems to have had an "interesting" life and to need a lot of work to undo some of the harm that has been perpetrated upon it (by person or persons unknown before it came to the present seller). See for instance this picture (which the seller has kindly sent me to supplement those in his original post): Two reeds around the 4 o'clock position are clearly too long for their slots (and will have done some mischief to the inside of the end), and the adjacent two around the 5 o'clock position are too short. This is consistent with the discussion on the original thread about many notes having been moved around from their normal positions. Also some reeds look a little rusty whereas others look bright, suggesting possibly a lot of rubbing-down in the course of retuning. Some of the clamping screws have badly chewed-up heads. Why on earth should those have ever been disturbed since the day it was made? And then there are the two reeds near the middle, with the reed frames held in place by screws at both ends. It seems unlikely that those notes were added after the instrument was first made, but is that method of fixing known from other Lachenals? I eagerly await any words of wisdom.
  25. With any luck the web pages will remain available on the Internet Archive.
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