Re: [Harp-L] Seydel Repair Options

[Joseph Leone <3n037@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I would also disagree with him Gary. A crack is generally ACROSS the reed. When the reeds are milled at the factory, they are cut at 90 degrees to the length of the reed. Which, at the time, is part of a larger strip. Then the individual reeds are snipped off. But the point I'm trying (desperately) to make IS: When the larger strip is milled, unless the strip is perfectly flat, as the mill cuts..ANY deviation will result in the following.

1.. vibration.. can cause the strip to undulate
2.. unless the mill is very very sharp, some of the (lets call them) 'valleys' between the mill marks will be deeper than others.
3.. if these valleys are in the critical, lets call it, 'flex' area, the reed is weakest here.
4.. debris.. we have all seen the results of putting down vinyl tile only to find later that a tiny piece of trash was present. And it left a, shall we say, 'pimple'. Then, upon investigation, it turned out that the debris was  just a speck of dirt. Well, the same thing can happen if the cutting table is not totally clean. 
5.. now IF there is any amount of, shall we say, 'slag' in the reed material, a natural flaw is present. This is what may have happened with the..Vaunted steel reeds that
 the other gentleman experienced.
6.. Btw, ANY mill will have a certain life cycle. Just to use these figures only as examples: If a mill has a life of 1000 cycles of work, the first 875 will be fine. Then the work gradually degrades to the point where the next 26 pieces will be iffy, then the next 38 will be Chrap, and the last 61 will be scrap. So, extrapolating reeds this waay, one can see that IF a reed batch is near the end of the mills 'life cycle;, the reeds will be suspects for mis behavior.   

Ok, so the reed failures I have had or seen have always been aCROSS the reed. And since most tuning slashes have been angular, I ascertained through a high degree of ascertainment, that polishing wasn't necessary from a STRUCTURAL standpoint. So..I originally did the..so called polishing..to thin down the reed and make it easier to flex it.
BUT as the other gentleman advised, this can be a point of diminishing returns as there is honest probability that you have made the reed TOO flexy (flexy is a Pgh word). lol

I used to, let's call it, 'thin' the reeds on a harp known as a Blues Harp. Because I had a hard time bending the reeds I wanted to bend. That was when I was young. Through time, AND the increase in quality..not to mention the spl-20s that I use exclusively, I learned to finess the reeds better. 

For polishing/thinning I used the following: 
1.. erasers from mechanical drafting pencils. They are a lot smaller in diameter than those on a standard cedar wood pencil. I would glue them into a small fibre ferrule used for model aircraft control wire leads. They didn't have 2 part  epoxy at the time. And if they did, I didn't know about it. I would then stick a 1/8" (3mm) dowel in the other end. This was chucked into a variable speed drill. 
2.. the erasers came in 3 grits. Soft (@ #2 pencils), Medium (@ hard pencils and some ink), and  Ink. 


smokey joe   


On Nov 11, 2013, at 8:13 PM, Gary Lehman wrote:

> I have an ongoing disagreement with a local player who insists that tuning marks lead to reed failure. 
> I don't buy it. 
> Steve, good luck, maybe you can find a NOS low D SP20. 
> Gary