Re: [Harp-L] A New Kind of Harp Rack Needed



Jon Gindick wrote:
Damn, I hate ALL the racks out there.

I don't like how they look either, though Vern's rack looks darn cool.


But the rack that has haunted me for 42 years was one I saw Spider John Koerner play at the Gaslight in Greenwich Village in 1968. Koerner played harp very well, and coordinated it with his amazing guitar playing with great magic.

However, the thing that got me was that when he was singing the thing was down, his face wasn't covered, and the moment he needed it he could bump it upward with his arm and it snapped right into place. And of course he could knock it back out of the way when he got back to singing. I have never seen another rack like that. I wrote him about it a few years back but I got no reply.

About five years ago I got a tremendous idea: magnets. Being mechanically incompetant my attempts at trying to set up a pair of magnets on each stem in such a way that they would face each other and click together when needed were pathetic. I discovered that you need very powerful magnets, the kind called Neodymium, as the weaker ones do not hold worth a damn for this use.

I feel certain that there is off-the-shelf hardware that would assemble well and be adjustable - I just don't have the knowlege to make it happen. If anyone comes up with the assembly, please publish it, or sell it.




This archive was generated by a fusion of Pipermail 0.09 (Mailman edition) and MHonArc 2.6.8.