Aluminium reed frames

[Ron123]

Was the use of aluminium reed frames common practice? I was looking at an Edeophone the other day and that was fitted aluminium frames.

 

Regards

Ron

[jdms]

Was the use of aluminium reed frames common practice? I was looking at an Edeophone the other day and that was fitted aluminium frames.

 

Others will have more definite knowledge, but I believe it became at least relatively common practice in later years--my 1950s Aeola has aluminum frames. The Edeophone you were inspecting would be earlier than that, of course, but wasn't aluminum cheap enough to use regularly by the 1930s?

 

jdms

[Stephen Chambers]

As I mentioned in Some Notes on Lachenal Concertina Production and Serial Numbers:

 

Edeophone number 38694 (CMC 262) is a 63-key instrument with bowing valves and aluminium reed frames. It sounds remarkably like the unusual instrument described by J. A. Black in January 1895: ‘. . .I have just come into possession of an edeophone (treble) by those truly progressive makers, Messrs. Lachenal. . .This fine instrument (played by Mr. Alsepti [black’s teacher] at Islington on December 4th last) though of sixty-three keyed and four and a half octave compass, weighs only two and three quarter pounds, or exactly the weight of a forty-eight keyed concertina’. So perhaps No. 38694 should be dated to circa 1894.

 

The use of aluminium in concertinas was pioneering at such an early date, though the composition of the metal they used at that time seems (in retrospect) to have been unstable and examples are sometimes found where it has crumbled away.

[Ron123]

Hello

 

Thank you for the replies, do you know if aluminium reed frames became more common place from the 1920s onward in Edephones?

 

Regards

Ron

[Stephen Chambers]

... do you know if aluminium reed frames became more common place from the 1920s onward in Edephones?

 

Ron,

 

I've only ever seen a relative handful of Lachenal instruments with aluminium frames though we know that Wheatstone's started to use it more, in the form of the harder alloy Duralumin (invented in 1909), in the 1920s.

[Ron123]

Hello

 

Thank you both for the replies.Very useful information much appreciated.

 

Ron