Lachenal Catalogue listing parts for sale.

[Chris Ghent]

2 hours ago, adrian brown said:

 

Thanks for that Chris - that makes sense, I'd forgotten that buttons are not always solid!

 

But to come back to the vibrators, (and I hope you won't think I am obsessing over this!) if it indeed refers to the reed tongues, has anybody ever seen gold and/or silver reeds? I would have thought that quite apart from the cost, both would be a worse material than brass or steel?

 

Cheers

 

Adrian

Adrian, 

I have seen silver and gold reeds but only courtesy of Stephen Chambers who once gave me the most entertaining of lessons in early British free reed history at his house in Kilkee. The exotic materials were in the reeds of Aeolinas, a precursor to the concertina. You can read about them here https://www.patmissin.com/history/aeolina.html The ones Stephen showed me were made by Wheatstone. 
 

What worries me about the gold reeds is the price of a concertina with them is less than double a steel reed instrument. Without access to 1860s gold prices I have no idea if this makes sense, though one has to accept it does.  

[Chris Ghent]

1 hour ago, wes williams said:

Buttons are usually referred to as studs by Lachenal, but also as 'touches' which I think refers to buttons where the cap only is metal.

 

Reeds/vibrators other than brass or steel are rare, but do exist in these early versions. Please see this price list from a year or two earlier, where the various playing properties of the metals are given.

Years ago Richard Evans showed me buttons made in three parts, 1, a wooden stem comprised of a spigot at the bottom to locate in the actionboard and a barrel with the usual twin conical holes, 2, a nickel copper cylinder sleeve over the top of the upper part of it, and 3, a real silver domed cap soldered to the top of the cylinder, being about two millimetres high and forming the part of the button where you would touch it.  He was remaking several of the silver tops which had fallen off.  

[Richard Mellish]

I would expect the cost of the usual raw materials to be a small fraction of the total cost of a concertina, so even changing to gold for the reeds might not make a huge difference. But I am intrigued about gold reeds. Pure gold would be far too soft, so presumably it must have been an alloy, but even so wouldn't some other alloy, not including gold, offer similar properties? Gold on the outside makes sense as bling if nothing else (and I have it on two of my concertinas) but who's going to see gold on the inside?

[Chris Ghent]

Fair point, there is never any point in saving money on materials when you use so little of them.  The Aeolinas I mentioned were a gentleman’s toy and the reeds were visible so gold made sense. Or at least some sense. 

[wes williams]

17 hours ago, Richard Mellish said:

Gold on the outside makes sense as bling if nothing else (and I have it on two of my concertinas) but who's going to see gold on the inside?

That's why I linked the earlier price list, as it attributes the various metals with the variations in sound they make rather than anything else.

[Chris Ghent]

Wes, it is true I did not take the descriptions of the sounds available with different reed materials very seriously; they reek of positive spin advertising.
 

Metal (presumably brass?), not bad, Silver, so quiet as to be unusable anywhere but a small room, Tempered Steel, these ones work best, Gold, even quieter. These differences being based on how stiff the reed material is but being sold by relative prestige. 

 

It reminds me of sitting at a multi stop reed organ for the first time and being unable to find great differences in the tone between the stops.  Volume differences, missing top end, but certainly not what was promised on the stop.  

 

 

 

[adrian brown]

1 hour ago, Chris Ghent said:

Wes, it is true I did not take the descriptions of the sounds available with different reed materials very seriously; they reek of positive spin advertising.
 

Metal (presumably brass?), not bad, Silver, so quiet as to be unusable anywhere but a small room, Tempered Steel, these ones work best, Gold, even quieter. These differences being based on how stiff the reed material is but being sold by relative prestige. 

 

It reminds me of sitting at a multi stop reed organ for the first time and being unable to find great differences in the tone between the stops.  Volume differences, missing top end, but certainly not what was promised on the stop.  

 

 

 

 

Silver and gold reeds can hardly have been very popular given that nobody here seems to have seen a concertina with them, otherwise surely some of them would have survived?

 

It's slightly telling that a set of steel reeds is 50% more expensive than a silver set - a sign of the extra work involved in fitting the harder material?

 

I wondered for a while if the silver and gold descriptions were more a quality statement than the actual material, but my previous statement knocks that one on the head.  Is this the only extant advert/price list describing reeds made from precious metals?

 

Adrian

 

[Paul_Hardy]

1 hour ago, adrian brown said:

Silver and gold reeds can hardly have been very popular given that nobody here seems to have seen a concertina with them, otherwise surely some of them would have survived?

I have a concertina with 'Silver' reeds - see https://pghardy.net/concertina/wheatstone_11689/wheatstone_11689.html. 

It has nice tone for round the house playing.

[Daniel Hersh]

On 1/1/2025 at 7:41 PM, Chris Ghent said:

Stephen, I found the one I meant, its from 1864

 

Chris, where did you find this?  Is it online somewhere, or do you have a paper copy?

[Chris Ghent]

30 minutes ago, Daniel Hersh said:

 

Chris, where did you find this?  Is it online somewhere, or do you have a paper copy?

Wish I had it, I think I would frame it.  No, I saw it online somewhere, maybe on one of the facebook concertina groups. It turned out I had discussed it with a friend back then and he had found it and kept a copy.  

[Chris Ghent]

On 1/8/2025 at 6:53 AM, Paul_Hardy said:

I have a concertina with 'Silver' reeds - see https://pghardy.net/concertina/wheatstone_11689/wheatstone_11689.html. 

It has nice tone for round the house playing.

I wonder if these reeds are german silver, a blend of nickel and copper?  I have a seen a number of these, all in older concertinas.  More copper than nickel.  

[adrian brown]

11 hours ago, Chris Ghent said:

I wonder if these reeds are german silver, a blend of nickel and copper?  I have a seen a number of these, all in older concertinas.  More copper than nickel.  

 

Yes I hadn't thought of that - makes perfect sense from the pricing point of view, doesn't it? Now it's just those pesky gold vibrators to worry about... There would be no point in electro plating them would there? I see it was quite a state of the art technology in the 1850's

 

Adrian

[wes williams]

17 hours ago, Chris Ghent said:

I wonder if these reeds are german silver, a blend of nickel and copper?  I have a seen a number of these, all in older concertinas.  More copper than nickel.  

I came to the same conclusion after re-reading through the first three of Stephen Chambers' papers here . The first paper gives plenty of examples of early reeds of non-standard materials.

 

Lachenal branded concertinas only started around 1858, when the 1844 Wheatstone patent expired, although Lachenal had been making complete 'patent' concertinas for Wheatstone since about 1846/7. With the death of Louis Lachenal in 1861, and William Wheatstone in 1862, links between the two firms started reducing and by the mid 1860s we see the influence of Edward Chidley Senior on Wheatstone production, see here , so both firms were going their own ways at this time, and perhaps Lachenal stopped or reduced non-standard reed production/sales soon after this date.