Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Steve_freereeder]

Screwing into end grain also gives the poorest grip.

Yup!

<Rolls over with legs in the air. >

[Pete Dunk]

There's a place here for engineering plastics. Dimensionally stable, self lubricating and easily worked. Not traditional granted but the slides Gena has used are plastic so why not the blocks?

[Gena Crisman]

So, update! I ordered some turning blanks (for pens) that came with 4 pairs of different sorts of wood, including Ramin, and Beech, and also some American Tulipwood. Removing the old block from the slide was not a big deal, honestly the epoxy glue peeled off of the smooth plastic fairly easily. I don't think that will happen in normal operation because the flex of the slide between the attaching block and the reed block will likely absorb any wiggling. The wood sampler selection cost me around 6 pounds, and gives me lots of play with, so, I'm quite happy with that.

I used the Ramin to create 2 new blocks, and instead of epoxying the blocks on and then drilling the holes, I drilled the holes first. I drilled the holes only to 3mm this time, and tried waxing the threads of the stop rods, which did let me thread them in to this wood, and the blocks didn't show any signs of exploding. I re-taped up the inside of the bass end and epoxied the blocks on with the rods inserted, all in situ, giving little tweaks to the rod left/right/up/down etc to try and account for any unwanted off angle, and that seemed to work. Since the margins between rod block and slide were greater, I used more glue, so naturally there was a lot of glue leakage, all caught by the tape thankfully, and the rods are much more straight up/down. Epoxy is a very good space filling glue, so, I figure that this will be fine.

You'll note that I'm using a lot of plurals - I made my Fundamental slide and added that, too, so now I have 2 bass stops on my melodeon! Removing the needed section of mounting block was much easier this time - I allowed myself to use the power drill to drill the initial holes to remove material, and I also bought myself a narrow wood chisel, which the local hardware store guy game me a deal on because it was a bit marked up. The chisel made light work of splitting the grain and removing the material. The Scalpel though still seemed much better for whittling away material across the grain. When fashioning the slide, I drilled & expanded to 4mm holes, took the protective coating off of the plastic and positioned the slide on the reed block. I marked the plastic with 8 lines, like an *, to the edges of the actual hole in the reed block (since I could see through to it underneath), aand then used my 3mm tungsten carbide cutting head in the dremel to carve out an octogon to those points. I clamped the dremel in place and moved the plastic around, holding it taught in my hands. I then followed up with the Dremel's narrower sanding tool to round them out: It was much easier to put the slide in place, eyeball which way the hole needed to go, and circling it out there by eye, at least versus my previous method of trying to encourage the drills. Drilling the plastic really like to catch it and spin it out: as it's so thin, it's difficult to clamp it down and work on more than one area of it without just having it flex or otherwise act out. Plus, because of the axial grinding I did this time, the holes in the slide also needed less finishing work as a result, which was a bonus. There was really nothing massively different about the results of what I did vs the pictures I have already posted, but the way I achieved the goals felt like a lot less effort had been expended on my part.

Fundamentals slide seems to work, as does the thirds slide. I'm really pretty happy about this change as it's going to let me do a lot more with this instrument than I could otherwise - having the low fundamental stop helps me feel a lot better about subbing a bass note in for a missing melody note. I'll need to spend some time experimenting with them both.

[Winston Smith]

Well done, Gena. I think there'll be quite a few blokes who have been used to working with hand tools etc who wouldn't take a job like that on.
(Not being at all sexist there, as I'm perfectly sure that there are more males in that position than there are females!)

[Dick Rees]

For maximum strength and to minimize the chance of splitting, I would say make your own block material laminating slices of hardwood(s) oriented "cross-grain".  Strong, artistic if you care to alternate dark/light woods (walnut and maple) and highly resistant to splitting.

Just an idle thought...

[Steve_freereeder]

... make your own block material laminating slices of hardwood(s) oriented "cross-grain"...

I think it's been done before. It's called plywood. 

[Gena Crisman]

Just to give a sense of finality to adding bass stops to my Black Pearl, here's some photos of the new stop blocks and the 2nd plunger. The Fundamental stop has a bit more travel in it, but that's fine, the holes are bigger anyway. The stops are positioned evenly, however the button for clipping the bellows strap shut is not, so, makes things look a bit uneven.

Additionally I used both stops when playing for October 2018's tune of the month, the Hesleyside Reel. I think some of the bass reeds could do with tuning but not really as a result of this process, but that's something I'll try and investigate myself later.

Also, due to posting activity in it, I read a thread about the Castagnari Giordy. Due to its limited size, it uses 2 notes for its chord buttons. But, it apparently uses the 3rd and 5th, meaning to play the full chord, you simply play 'block' chords, so, the fundamental and chord button. This is a pretty weird way to have your chords work but does present a variety of interesting options, as the note make up becomes:
G/D chord: B+D / F#+A
C/C chord: E+G / E+G
D/A chord: F#+A / C#+E
B/Em chord: D#+F# / G+B

So that can clearly allow for some interesting combinations to form non standard or partial chords, especially for when you're playing with others. You can easily see in there D draw + G+B draw for a draw G chord, and B press + E+G press for a E minor press, as well as D chord + A chord draw for a F#+A+C#+E = F#m7... the list goes on, as it always does. And this is all at little cost if you're already playing mostly block chords for a tune.

Of course, to use a slide under the reed block, your reed plates have to share the tonics and fifths, maybe some do, I neglected to check, but, I imagine they probably don't in my instrument but next time I have it open, I'll check. I can see why Benammi Swift had his instrument modified to have a lot of bass stops for the individual notes (talked about in this thread starting here + posts from the man himself) - it's a very interesting concept: I wish we had more control over all the reeds we have in our bass ends, or at least that the mechanisms to control them didn't take up so much space.

I've also learnt that Carini's do seem to have a lot of coupler components etc on their site but it's all mostly indecipherable to me, both linguistically and mechanically.