I’ve been asked to refurbish the concertina.  As found it has new bellows, and all the notes play, but it is somewhat sad a scruffy looking with improvised thumb straps, end bolts adapted from a different instrument, and the ebony end frames surrounding the fretwork are badly worn, and many have been replaced with non matching timber.  Its going to need the usual replacement of pads and valves, at least six new end bolts, new straps, cleaning and polishing of the metalwork and tuning.  But the major task is to replace the moulded ebony rail round the ends.   I did consider trying to repair what is there, but there is really very little of the original left and its going to be a better end result to replace rather than repair.

The new bass plate fitted in place after marking out and drilling 12 holes on a rectangular grid.   The holes are reamed to about 10mm to accommodate an 8mm button and .9mm bushing of woven felt.  The holes are slightly conical getting larger towards the inside of the box to keep a good fit on the outside, but to allow some tolerance in alignment of the axis of the button with the axis of the hole. I borrowed this technique from concertina construction.

Next task is to reconfigure the mechanism to pair up bass and chord melodeon style (vertically) rather than stradella style.

Original 12 bass mechanism

This is the stradella layout, also showing the air button which is badly placed for melodeon playing, more of that later.

The pallets also need to be re-faced so I’ll do them while the mechanism is out of the way.

I’m hoping I can reuse the wire rods and just shift them to different positions.

Pallets cleaned and glued onto new felt/leather

Several of the button rods snapped when straightening the end to detach from the lever

So it will have to be new rods then.  The buttons are real mother of pearl so I’ll need to be careful to avoid damage when removing them.  Gentle heating with a gas flame softens the original adhesive which looks like shellac and they pull of easily.

Fortunately the rods are made of 1.5mm steel wire, exactly the same material as thin filler rod for gas welding which I have a stack of.  So its down to a couple of hours of careful bending and fitting to get the new rods made and installed.

Levers ready to accept pallets and rods

First levers fitted

All the new levers formed and fitted

Now its time for the reeds.

The reed work was fairly straightforward because the client has his own custom layout which is partly unisonoric and has no thirds in the chords. The D/G version of this layout is available here on melodeon.net.The unisonoric notes were able to use the original unisonoric accordion reeds as they were.  The chords each have three reeds either tonic+fifth+tonic, or fifth+tonic+fifth,   the choice being used to keep all the chord reeds within a compass of one octave.

Finally, I fitted a catch for the bellows lock to the bass block, replaced bellows gaskets and one or two other minor bits of tidying up and the job is done.

I found Clive’s unisonoric layout is very easy to adapt to after  only playing conventional melodeon basses.

Here is Clive’s response after receiving the converted instrument:

.. and here it is, all done, in action!

It’s a *fabulous* box to play; light, fast, great sound, and as flexible as my Mory (it’s got the same semi-unisonoric layout on the basses). It’s in Bb/Eb of course.

And these are the tunes that came out when it said hello: The Wrong Turn is a waltz/mazurka thingy written by Anne Marie Summers, English bagpiper, probably best known for her duo with Stephen Tyler on Hurdy Gurdy, and the trio Wendigo (with Julian Sutton). Played from *distant* memory, so it’s probably some way away from the original tune! The Sportsman’s is a traditional tune, and one I’ve known for ages, but only recently come back to playing after we’ve started using it in our Vivant stuff (slower than I play it here).

Thanks Theo!

Clive

I have another Hohner Regina 12 bass waiting to be united with a Preciosa if anyone wants one!

The Hohner Preciosa and Hohner Regina

Fortunately the bellows are identical so its very quick to do this:

Preciosa treble joined to Regina 12 bass

But that’s not quite all there is to do.   The arrangement of the bass buttons has to be completely changed.  The buttons are to altered to a retabgular grid, instead of the skewed pattern at present.  The function of the buttons also has to be changed from a stradella system, to a custom melodeon system.  This will require modifications to the reeds, and to the mechanism that connects the buttons to the reeds.

First task is to make a new button panel to replace the one with skewed button layout.  Removing the old panel is nice and easy because it is glued in with that wonderful substance: hide/scotch/animal glue.  It softems in water so just apply some water to the joints, leave for half an hour, scraping off the surface glue after a while and eventually it comes out without damage.

soaking the glue prior to removing button board.

glue released

Now to prepare the replacement.  A suitable piece of plywood which should be less prone to distort than the original, and some white pearloid that is not quite an exact match, but pretty close.

replacement material

To glue these together I simply flood the surface of the wood with acetone, place the pearloid sheet on top, and clamp for a couple of hours in this wonderful nipping press.

Nipping press

Then with a bit of measuring and four cuts on the saw we have the new board ready to mark out and drill.