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Square vs hexagonal (or octagonal) bellows


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Edward Jay is presently building a 73 (!!!) button Hayden.  He uses accordion reeds and has managed to keep the size down by using square bellows.  You can read about it on (spits) Facebook.

 

I have been talking to him about making a Hayden and I am wondering if there are any problems/issues with square bellows vs. hex bellows.  In particular, I would like to hear from anyone who has owned one of the (very few) square bellowed instruments that have been made by other makers.

 

I can see why hex shaped bellows make sense for a radial reed pan of concertina reeds, a square reed pan makes more sense for packing in a lot of accordion reeds, but what about from a play-ability perspective?

Edited by Don Taylor
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My first concertina was a square-ended Herrington. Square is fine, and doesn't really hurt playability in my opinion. It does feel a little bulkier, at least partly because for a given distance across the flats, the ends have greater surface area and the corners stick out a bit more. Aesthetically, I now prefer a concertina with more sides (at least until it starts rolling away), but there's nothing wrong with being square, and that has its own charm.

 

I suspect that past a certain size, the squareness will start to have more of an impact on the angle you hold the instrument at. I could rest the Herrington on its corner at whatever angle was comfortable, but a bigger instrument might make that more awkward. That's purely speculation though, and the instrument's weight would also be a factor.

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There is no inherent problem with square bellows, however, one adjustment to design is essential - button array should have a small forward slant, dependent on the size of the instrument. This is because you cannot rotate the box to align it properly relative to your elbow height in sitting position, as the rotation point is way too far forward and the lever length is greater, making it very unstable. This lever length is a problem even on large octagons - my 66b is 8 2/3" and I had to make a lap pad to anchor it in stable position and force a forward slant of about 10 degrees. This lap pad was also necessary for one other very important reason, which is also the biggest problem with Edward's design - his button array is at the center and the hand strap/hand rail is very close to the edge, when a desired configuration is opposite - button array should be off center and the hand rail/hand strap should be as close to the center as possible. My button array is only 1-1,5 rows too far back and it already creates big enough wobble between push and pull endplates angle to make it difficult to maintain stable LH rhytms. With force offsets as huge as Edward's this will be way worse. Large contact area of square sides will help a bit, but this particular design would benefit a lot from anatomically curved lap pad/s or velcro lap strap for at least LH side.

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1 hour ago, Łukasz Martynowicz said:

There is no inherent problem with square bellows, however, one adjustment to design is essential - button array should have a small forward slant, dependent on the size of the instrument. This is because you cannot rotate the box to align it properly relative to your elbow height in sitting position, as the rotation point is way too far forward and the lever length is greater, making it very unstable.

 

That's what I had wondered about. I didn't find that the Herrington suffered from that issue, but it was in the neighborhood of the standard 6-1/4". The buttons were also near one edge as you recommend.

 

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Edited by Steve Schulteis
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6 hours ago, Steve Schulteis said:

 

That's what I had wondered about. I didn't find that the Herrington suffered from that issue, but it was in the neighborhood of the standard 6-1/4". The buttons were also near one edge as you recommend.

 

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It has perfectly normal handrail/buttons placement for ~6” instruments, where there is simply no room for moving handrail more to the front, no matter if it is square, hex or octagon. On push you have a pretty perfect alignment of the squeezing force along the center of the bellows and you only have a small offset on pull.  The problem with large Haydens of any shape is lever routing when there are more than five rows of buttons, which forces you to move the button array a row or two towards the back. In case of Haydens, bandoneon action has way more sense than concertina action.

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An important consideration for the number of sides: for any given dimension across the flats the more sides you use the smaller the square area of the end will be. The smaller the square area of the end the less pressure is needed to create a given air pressure/vacuum.  In use this will translate as less force needed and quicker response. The bellows will travel further for the same amount of air. 
 

Another thing; it is important to be able to hold the concertina in such a way that the ends do not waggle on bellows direction changes. This waggle is induced because the handrests are inevitably not in the centre of the concertina. With a hexagonal concertina the usual method of reducing waggle is to roll the concertina forward onto the point, and the top of the handrest is then close to the centre of the concertina. Any force applied downward with the thumb will bisect the end of the concertina and it will not waggle on that end. The other end is a more complex problem!  With a square concertina it will likely be held on the flat and the handrest will be very off centre. 
 

Played a Harley once, square of course, lovely concertina. 

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3 hours ago, Chris Ghent said:

for any given dimension across the flats the more sides you use the smaller the square area of the end will be.

 

This is true, but irrelevant. It is just as true that for any given dimension from corner to opposite corner the more sides you use the larger the square area of the end will be. It is only by arbitrary convention that we refer to the size of a concertina by the measurement across the flats rather than from corner to corner. Neither has any more intrinsic validity than the other. So if you compare the force necessary to move the bellows between a square concertina and a hexagonal concertina of the “same size,” you will get a different result depending on whether you define “same size” as across the flats or corner to corner.

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8 hours ago, David Barnert said:

 

This is true, but irrelevant. It is just as true that for any given dimension from corner to opposite corner the more sides you use the larger the square area of the end will be. It is only by arbitrary convention that we refer to the size of a concertina by the measurement across the flats rather than from corner to corner. Neither has any more intrinsic validity than the other. So if you compare the force necessary to move the bellows between a square concertina and a hexagonal concertina of the “same size,” you will get a different result depending on whether you define “same size” as across the flats or corner to corner.

 

Also true, David, but I do not think that it makes Chris' elaborations irrelevant. There is also the practical consideration that the end face of a concertina should (for ergonomics purposes) have the smallest size that accomodates the reeds needed, so the "reduction" argument imho outweights your purely mathematical observation.

 

In other words: If you start out with, say, a square concertina and add sides, keeping the corner-to-corner size constant, then you add more unused space (at least as long as you do not add any reeds) which is ergonomically undesireable. So your blown-up octagon circumfering the square may be (relatively speaking) more bellow efficient, but it is less playable. The surface covered by the finger board will trivially not change, but the unused space around it will.

 

If, on the other hand, you measure side-to-side and keep reducing the number of sides until you have exhausted the maximum density allowed for by the reed dimensions, you make the instrument more bellows efficient as well as better playable.

 

I ran across a similar issue when Alex had built my Crane #3. He used a number of elaborate tricks to squeeze all the reeds needed into an octagonal shape (standard concertina measurements across the flats required by his toolset). As a result, I now play a wonderful small sized, leight weight AND bellow efficient instrument.
 

Btw, all the best wishes for 2023 for you and everybody else here on the forum!

 

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Square vs hex vs octagon size debate has two separate flavours - for traditional reeds and construction it is circumference that is more important than area, while with accordion reeds it is area coverage efficiency that is more important than circumference. For accordion reeds, square/rectangular box makes way more sense, as there is no wasted area between reeds and reedpan edges. Both hex and especially octagon shapes must be larger flat to flat than squares. I’m currently solving lever routing/reed placement problem for a small 46 button Hayden hybrid and I can easily fit all the reeds in a 6” square with no inner reeds, but hex needs to be 7” and has some inner reeds (single layer, flat mounted). However, at the same time it is impossible to route levers in this 6” box, as some levers end up too short.

 

And a word about bellows cross section and resulting differences. There is one important gain from larger cross section for Duets, that is usually overlooked when talking about concertinas, because of the Anglo dominant character of most of such discussions. Larger bellows provide not only all the air for thick chords and multiple voices, but also mechanical stability. I currently have two boxes fitted with my antlers, heavy 8 2/3” and very light 7 1/4”. It is noticeably harder to play fast rhytmic accompaniment on the small one, despite smaller jumps. Even without lap pad, larger one simply stays oriented the same way throughout the whole bellows travel in a single direction, while smaller one is harder to keep balanced and reacts more to finger taps. 

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I bought a square Herrington CG (possibly the one in the picture above! It looks like my case) 25 or so years ago, and have since owned a number of more traditionally shaped instruments.

 

I'll leave a technical discussion of the ergonomics of instrument shape to those who are more knowledgable.  What I can say: I never felt much of a  difference in terms of playability.  For a few years, I'd switch back and forth at dances between the square Herrington and a more conventionally shaped vintage Anglo without any awkwardness.  I played the Herrington standing up for Morris, sitting down for contra/ceilidh dances, and never felt that the shape had any impact on my playing

 

Having owned a number of instruments and played many more, I believe there is no universally "right" box shape, button design, button spacing, etc.  We all have preferences, but my experience is that we quickly adapt to physical differences in  the instruments we end up with. Every new instrument I've purchased felt awkward and strange at first, then perfectly fine after a while.

 

We can drive ourselves a little crazy obsessing about a chimerical perfection.

Edited by Jim Besser
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Thanks for all of these thoughts.

 

My takeaway is that square works well for a small concertina - 6" or so, but not so well for a larger box.

 

I had hoped that Edward Jay might be interested in building a small, square Hayden with as many buttons as possible but he seems to want to focus on bigger boxes.

 

A pity as the only small Hayden currently available is the Concertina Connection Troubadour and that simply does not have enough buttons on the LHS.

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6 hours ago, Don Taylor said:

Thanks for all of these thoughts.

 

My takeaway is that square works well for a small concertina - 6" or so, but not so well for a larger box.

 

I had hoped that Edward Jay might be interested in building a small, square Hayden with as many buttons as possible but he seems to want to focus on bigger boxes.

 

A pity as the only small Hayden currently available is the Concertina Connection Troubadour and that simply does not have enough buttons on the LHS.


I had no time last year for this project, but there is a non-zero chance I will build/print a prototype of a sqare standard, around 6 - 6 1/4” this year. Just last week I’ve made some preliminary tests of new printed lever design that allows for curved levers, which are absolutely necessary to solve reed placement and lever routing problem on Haydens. The goal stays the same - small and cheap standard, as FB groups show that there is quite an interest in the system, but both Stagi and Elise are just too subpar choices and then there is a significant price jump to Troubadour, which simply isn’t worth that much money.

 

And Edward not only want big boxes, he also prefers playing in all keys over having wide range. Despite huge button count his current box goes down only to A2.

 

I don’t promise anything, as my mind has a tendency to wander away from concertinas from time to time, but it just turned out in the last few months, that not simply my job, but my entire profession might just become obsolete by the end of year. So I may have all the time in the world soon…

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