Lachenal Loosing Air

[m3838]

Hello.

Brass reeded 20 button Lachenal Anglo has arrived minutes ago.

The supplyer is Chris Algar from Barleycorn.

Concertina is cute, cosmetically is iin very good shape, with 5 fold bellows, well working action and mellow tone.

I would like to improve the reeds response, for which:

I am thinking about:

1. Checking if the reed shoes are loose from the transportation

2. If the valves are misplaced (hence some air escaping)

3. Reeds setting - trip to a shop.

4. The gaps in the reed-shoe assembly (perhabs to be fixed with that thin metallic tape)

-------------------

What else?

[Henk van Aalten]

I should have asked Chris about these points before placing this message.

[m3838]

I did ask Chris and got reply.

I will check the shoes sitting snugly in their slots, push the reed down a bit to make them speak sooner and I will replace those G reeds with shaprs to make this little instrument chromatic. If I'm successful, I'll get a better 2 row.

But I'd like to hear about possible tricks to improve otherwise healthy Lachenal from people, who did this. Un-traditional solutions, may be?

Thanks.

[Frank Edgley]

"Brass-reeded" is the key. While brass reeds do have a mellow tone, you can expect only so much(as far as response is concerned) from a brass-reeded instrument.

[keeper]

I bought an old Lachenal G/D anglo with brass reeds from Chris Algar about 18 months ago and the major improvmeent that I made was to gently 'rough up' the chamois leather air-seals to improve compression. Whilst I know that this is not the same as directly improving the read response, any reduction in air loss will improve the overall response and the improvement was really quite considerable.