Re: [Harp-L] Custom Harmonicas - Worth It?




On Apr 15, 2008, at 2:53 PM, Frank Evers wrote:


Am Dienstag, 15. April 2008 schrieb Vern Smith:
I think that as a hard player troubled with reed failures, you
would be a good tester for Seydel stainless steel reeds.  It seems
likely to me that SS reeds would not fatigue as quickly as
copper-alloy reeds do....maybe not at all.  You could report your
experience to us.

I've seen many reports of broken Seydel SS reeds. They are subject to fatigue, probably not as quickly, but they break. Additional research for optimized reed profiles might make them still sturdier, i don't think Seydel has reached the optimum yet.

-- Gruß,Frank

All metals suffer from the same enigma. The 'Mix'. The gold standard in the U.S. is .995. Bullion can go anywhere from .991 to .999. I don't think they are as touchy with brass. I think that brass may be as low as .873. It would take too much fluxing and there would be too much loss of dross to make brass finer than this. Specks of silica can really do havoc.


Soo, what do we have? Well, we could have 1000 reeds of which 873 are pure and 127 which are absolute garbage. This isn't going to happen. It's more likely that 87 reeds will be pure and 913 will have 'some' impurities. Even more likely, 8 will be pure and 992 will have some impurities. Some more than others. You might have as high as 330-335 which are suspect as to content.

What this means is that there is almost NO probability of getting ALL good reeds in a harp. Since William F. Buckley is no longer with us, I take it upon myself the burden of educating everyone to the possibility that in a harp of 20 reeds. at least 6-7 will be 'iffy'. It isn't a matter if IF one will fail, it's a matter of when.

Then, if this weren't enough, the milling process can be sloppy. This will also create problems.

smo-joe




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