Re: Breaking in Harps and Quality Control

[Ted Allbritton <ted@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Tim and Harvey,

If we stand firm at the store, as you do, Tim, and if ultimately the 
manufacturer is forced to take back the bad harps, this kind of thing will 
not happen so often. I just bought about 15 harps from Kevin, and I really 
like my service from Kevin, but like you say, Harvey, mail order pretty 
much ends your chance for complaint. I save enough buying mail order that 
I can afford to get a few bad harps, which I leave in the glove 
compartment or use to try to learn tuning, repair, etc. Still, I got in 
the last order three harps that were pretty worthless. They were cheap 
harps, but even a cheap harp should have some quality. One was badly 
tuned, which I will try to fix. One Silvertone feels as if it has iron 
reeds. And a Huang tremelo  thing I bought for a lark, and which sounded 
good for a few days, began to get kind of tangled up tones, like all those 
reeds were going a little flat or sharp. My nine year old daughter loved 
it, nevertheless. She's not as finicky as her old Dad. Anyway, maybe we 
need to complain about this return policy and raise a deafening clamour 
for replaceable single reeds. Why not single reeds? Because the 
manufacturers know a good thing-their refusal to design replaceable single 
reeds keeps us throwing out 19 good reeds, comb, reed plates, screws, 
covers and boxes, and buying 20 more reeds, etc. of same. Lee Oscar could 
go a step further and offer just draw plates. The blows never seem to go. 
And for a chromatic, replaceable single reeds would be a major plus. Maybe 
there is some big flaw in my argument. I don't know much about repair. But 
it seems they should be able to offer us this. After all, harp playing is 
really expensive in the long run.

Ted@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

-There is a dream dreaming us.-
!Kung Bushman