Hering reed replacement (A Riveting Tale)

[paul-harker@xxxxxxxxxxx]

There's a question trailing my tale:

I had a misbehaving 7 blow reed in my Hering Vintage, and my spanking-new Hering toolkit w/reeds and rivets had just arrived. Thankfully, the kit included a reed the same size, so with fingers crossed I tackled the task of replacing the flakey reed.

The first thing I learned was it is very hard to do this sort of work with your fingers all twisted up, so I uncrossed my fingers.

Using the anvil, the pointed punch, and a hammer, it was very easy to remove the old reed and rivet.  Then came the hard part -- 1st of all I couldn't reuse the old rivet because it somehow managed to sneak itself into the land of 2nd socks.

The rivets supplied with the kit look nothing like rivets. They are more like a short steel dowel with one end tapered. Sort of like a headless nail. After much pondering I decided that somehow this nail-thing must really be a rivet. I dove in further, hoping not to hit bottom.

I "nailed" the reed to the reedplate, driving the rivet until  the entire pointed part extended slightly past the bottom of the reedplate. With some side-cutters, I snipped off the pointy end. This left a bit of rivet extending below, and slightly more above. Using a small pair of vice-grips on both ends of the rivet, I mashed both ends just slightly. 

Then, using the unslotted portion of the Hering anvil as a support,  I mashed the rivet as flat as possible with a hammer and the flat punch. Don't know how much fate I had toyed with, but the end result looked just fine.

A bit of retuning (my second effort in that realm as well), a bit of curve to the reed and tightening the gap, and the darn thing works just fine. Gotta be beginners luck.

Oh! The promised question:

Though all turned out well with my improvisational method, how are these darn rivets really supposed to be installed?