Johnnie wrote:
"Just to clarify, I too had direct experience 30 or so years ago, with swollen wood combs."
Eric: Sorry, I caught that on the reread, postsent. Zipped throught the initial post too fast and responded--bad habit.
Johnnie wrote:
"Given the failure of your trimming/soaking attempts, did you come up with another solution or work-around? Did you seal your combs? Just grin-and-bare it? Switch to a back up as swelling occurred and became unbearable? Add songs in more keys to your repetoire?"
Eric: No, I never sealed my combs. I don't think I had even heard of that
process back then. I'm not even clear on where I first heard about soaking:
Maybe Tony Glover's book. I don't have the book any more--or I would check.
I do remember other players talking about soaking or asking me if I did it.
If I'm remembering correctly, soaking was mostly experimental for me. It
did, indeed, seem to improve the playability, but it was pretty impractical
if you were jamming at a rock festival or on the beach. Who wants to carry a
glass around all the time? And then, of course, it did seem to ruin the
harmonica pretty quickly.
But, like others have mentioned, when the SP 20 came out, I switched to plastic combs and never looked back--until now.
Eric
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