Re: [Harp-L] re: Questions about Special 20's and Golden Melody's

["Tim Moyer" <wmharps@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jonathan Ross wrote:
> Why in god's name do it at all?  I can't imagine that it wouldn't 
> be much simpler to remove the reeds from the stock GM and replace 
> them with reeds taken from the S20 or MB in question.  No 
> alterations needed to the comb or reed-plate, just some time and 
> patience with removing and then re-riveting the reeds.  A minimal 
> re-tune to finish it off and I can't see this taking more than two 
> or three hours.

I don't really understand the need for an invocation here, except to 
try and make this seem outrageous.  Frankly, I don't understand why 
I'd want to spend two or three hours tediously moving reeds from one 
plate to another, giving myself no less than forty opportunities to 
make a fatal mistake, when I could spend 20 minutes trimming and 
drilling and finishing two plates to fit.  It also keeps the plate 
and reed work in-line with what I do as a standard practice on new 
harps.  

> For just dropping down to lowF or even Low E it would be much 
> easier to just retune a G as well.  I've had success retuning 
> reeds two hole tones and know that you can do much more quite 
> successfully (from, amongst other things, talks on harp-l).  So 
> why bother replacing the reed-plates at all?  Why not just 
> retune?  The same with high G.  

Again, what's the time and risk involved in retuning an entire set 
of plates by a whole tone or two?  Seems to me if there's 
any "reinventing the wheel" going on here, it's in retuning or 
replacing entire sets of reeds rather than simply trimming and 
drilling a different set of otherwise identical plates to fit.  

I've fit Marine Band plates (kind of the "universal plate donor" for 
Hohners) into a number of different harp bodies with a great deal of 
success.  PT Gazell plays a few harps I built him that have Marine 
Band plates mounted in old handmade Meisterklasses.  The T-Bone and 
Journeyman have MB plates mounted on Special 20 combs.  

To each his own.  That's one of the reasons we have this list, so we 
can share and discuss different ways of doing things.  

-tim

Tim Moyer
Working Man's Harps
http://www.workingmansharps.com/