Re: [Harp-L] B-Radical; HARMONIKAS Louny

[Vern <jevern@xxxxxxx>]

Brendan probably has more skill and experience than anyone in âdoing new stuffâ.  He can correct me if Iâm wrong, but I donât think that any of his innovations depended on making his own reeds and plates.  

Without knowing but guessing from publicly available clues, it appears that Harrison depended on an untried process for these parts that was either mot accurate enough or too expensive.

As Brendon says, wire EDM is very accurate but also very slow and thus expensive.  Iâm sure that it would make an excellent slot.  

I have made two machines for profiling the variable thickness of reeds. .On both, the motion of the cutting blades was along the long dimension of the reed as in the B-rad reeds.  This required a small-diameter cutter, approximately 1/16â or 1.5 mm.  Such cutters must run at high speed, are only long enough to cut one reed at a time and are not very stiff.  Clamping the thin, flexible reed stock in the mill poses many problems.

In my experience, multiple passes of very light cuts are required.  Trying to remove all of the metal in one pass tore the reed in two.  That is because as the cut approached the thin tip of the reed, it is deeper than the metal remaining in the reed to resist the cutting forces.  This is slow and tedious.  The performances of both of my machines were disappointing and enabled me to understand why the major manufacturer run large diameter cutters across the long dimension of the reed. The manufacturers profile a long strip of stock that is wider than the reed is long. Then they punch the reeds out with their long dimension across the cutter path.

Vern



> On Mar 23, 2016, at 7:20 AM, Brendan Power <bren@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> But as someone who tries to do new stuff with the harmonica I have a lot of
> respect for Brad's ambition, and what he achieved technically. Richard
> Sleigh sent me a B-Radical and I've had a close look under the microscope.
> The reeds and reedplates are VERY innovative. Looks like he was using Wire
> EDM to cut the plates, and the reeds are beautifully milled lengthways. Both
> are excellent uses of modern technology.
> 
> 
> 
> Wire EDM is already used to cut high-end accordion reedplates; you can see
> it in this excellent video from the respected Czech accordion reed maker
> HARMONIKAS:
> 
> http://www.harmonikas.cz/en/video-1#obsah
> 
> 
> 
> Wire EDM is very accurate but slow so will probably not replace stamping for
> mass production for a while yet. HARMONIKAS does stamping for most of their
> production. 
> 
> 
>