swiss knives and wood glue

Well, the incredible humidity in the north... or should I say the incredible lack of humidity... finally got to my little concertina. The action board, where the keys are sprung and the holes are drilled for the reeds, dryed out and cracked and warped and the poor little thing needed some emergency repairs.... I'd heard the problem developing earlier so I ordered Dave Elliot's repair guide, and happily the tools necessary were all contained within my trusty swiss army knife (Thanks, Peter). So following his advice I got some PVA wood glue and I took the the little thing apart to get to the inner workings...





That's the action board removed and the inside of the bellows and the reed pan... and there are the little white dots between the holes where I patched up the cracks... with the cardboard from one of Barclay's biscuit boxes (thanks, Barclay)...

So the little thing has most of it's tone back. I have to do one more repair on a spring on one of the keys that seems to be stuck. Now it lives in the bathroom with the humidifier on it at all times... it seems happier. It's such an odd little instrument... I'll paste a short history below..

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, a new group of musical instruments arose in Europe, whose origins may be traced to the arrival of examples of the Chinese free-reed mouth organ or sheng in Europe in the late eighteenth century (1). The main varieties of these new instruments were the mouth organ, developed in Germany around 1825; the accordion, patented in Vienna in 1829, and the concertina, invented by Charles Wheatstone around 1829 or 1830, initially as a scientific curiosity, but marketed from 1836 as a serious musical instrument.

The Wheatstone concertina rapidly achieved acclaim as a serious solo and ensemble instrument, not only becoming highly popular amongst musical amateurs, but attracting numerous virtuoso performers and composers.

Lord Balfour (British Prime Minister 1902-5) was in fact an ardent concertina player, and the explorers Shackleton and Livingstone both acquired Wheatstone concertinas (2).

A number of sonatas, concertos and chamber works involving the concertina appeared in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, by composers including Tschaikovsky, Macfarren,Benedict, Percy Grainger, Charles Ives, Molique, Regondi and Silas (3).

By the early years of the twentieth century, the concertina's popularity had broadened, giving rise to the working class concertina bands of England's northern mill towns, and the instrument also found a niche as a populist addition to the instrumentation of the Salvation Army band.